Asymptotic symmetries and subleading soft graviton theorem

Abstract

Motivated by the equivalence between the soft graviton theorem and Ward identities for the supertranslation symmetries belonging to the Bondi, van der Burg, Metzner and Sachs (BMS) group, we propose a new extension (different from the so-called extended BMS) of the BMS group that is a semidirect product of supertranslations and Diff(S2). We propose a definition for the canonical generators associated with the smooth diffeomorphisms and show that the resulting Ward identities are equivalent to the subleading soft graviton theorem of Cachazo and Strominger.