Reconstructing Minkowski space-time

Abstract

Minkowski space is a physically important space-time for which it is an urgent problem to find an adequate holographic description. In this paper we develop further the proposal made in [10] for the description as a duality between Minkowski space-time and a Conformal Field Theory defined on the boundary of the light-cone. We focus on the gravitational aspects of the duality. Specifically, we identify the gravitational holographic data and provide the way Minkowski space-time (understood in a more general context as a Ricci-flat space) is reconstructed from the data. In order to avoid the complexity of non-linear Einstein equations we consider linear perturbations and do the analysis for the perturbations. The analysis proceeds in two steps. We first reduce the problem in Minkowski space to an infinite set of field equations on de Sitter space one dimension lower. These equations are quite remarkable: they describe massless and massive gravitons in de Sitter space. In particular, the partially massless graviton appears naturally in this reduction. In the second step we solve the graviton field equations and identify the holographic boundary data. Finally, we consider the asymptotic form of the black hole space-time and identify the way the information about the mass of the static gravitational configuration is encoded in the holographic data.