Gabriel Herczeg (Brown)

Date: Tue. November 2nd, 2021, 11:30 am-12:30 pm
Location: Zoom seminar

The Newman-Penrose Map and the Classical Double Copy

Gauge-gravity dualities are powerful tools for understanding aspects of quantum gravity. Considerable progress has been made in relating scattering amplitudes in certain gravity theories to those in gauge theories—a correspondence which is sometimes called the “double copy.” Recently, double copies have also been realized in a classical setting as maps between exact solutions of gauge theories and gravity. In this talk, I will discuss a novel map between a certain class of real, exact solutions of Einstein’s equations, and self-dual solutions of the flat-space vacuum Maxwell equations. This map, called the Newman-Penrose map, is well-defined even for non-vacuum, non-stationary spacetimes, and provides a systematic framework for exploring gravity solutions in the context of the double copy that have not been previously studied in this setting. Moreover, the map can be given an alternative definition in terms of geometric structures defined on spacetime and projective twistor space. 

 

Host: Kara Farnsworth