Bondi-Metzner-Sachs symmetry, holography on null-surfaces and area proportionality of "light-slice" entropy

TL;DR

This paper reveals that key features like BMS symmetry, holography, and area-law entropy, previously thought unique to gravity and curved spacetime, also appear in Minkowski QFT, suggesting a common algebraic origin for thermal phenomena.

Contribution

It demonstrates the presence of gravitational and holographic features in Minkowski QFT and explores their algebraic connections, extending the understanding of modular localization and thermal behavior.

Findings

BMS symmetry and holography are present in Minkowski QFT.

A common algebraic origin links volume and area proportionality in thermal entropy.

Holography influences QFT beyond Lagrangian quantization, impacting modular localization.

Abstract

It is shown that certain kinds of behavior, which hitherto were expected to be characteristic for classical gravity and quantum field theory in curved spacetime, as the infinite dimensional Bondi-Metzner-Sachs symmetry, holography on event horizons and an area proportionality of entropy, have in fact an unnoticed presence in Minkowski QFT. This casts new light on the fundamental question whether the volume propotionality of heat bath entropy and the (logarithmically corrected) dimensionless area law obeyed by localization-induced thermal behavior are different geometric parametrizations which share a common primordeal algebraic origin. Strong arguments are presented that these two different thermal manifestations can be directly related, this is in fact the main aim of this paper. It will be demonstrated that QFT beyond the Lagrangian quantization setting receives crucial new impulses from holography onto horizons. The present paper is part of a project aimed at elucidating the enormous physical range of "modular localization". The latter does not only extend from standard Hamitonian heat bath thermal states to thermal aspects of causal- or event- horizons addressed in this paper. It also includes the recent understanding of the crossing property of formfactors whose intriguing similarity with thermal properties was, although sometimes noticed, only sufficiently understood in the modular llocalization setting.