Holographic realization of higher-spin Carrollian free fields

TL;DR

This paper develops a holographic framework for Carrollian free fields in flat spacetimes, linking higher-spin gravity to a Carrollian Coulomb gas and paving the way for flat holography quantization.

Contribution

It introduces a new boundary condition generalizing the diagonal gauge to flat spacetimes and reveals the structure of asymptotic symmetries and Carrollian transformations.

Findings

Constructed boundary conditions for flat spacetimes extending AdS diagonal gauge.

Identified asymptotic symmetry decomposition into physical and gauge transformations.

Linked flat space higher-spin gravity to a Carrollian Coulomb gas model.

Abstract

We provide a holographic bulk realization of Carrollian free-field structures arising in three-dimensional asymptotically flat (higher-spin) gravity. We construct a class of boundary conditions that generalizes the diagonal gauge of Anti-de Sitter to flat spacetimes. We show that the associated asymptotic symmetries decompose into genuine physical transformations and pure gauge redundancies, the latter being generated by Carrollian screening charges. This structure leads to a bulk-born realization of Carrollian Miura transformations, expressing physical observables in terms of celestial free scalars. Our results establish a concrete link between flat space (higher-spin) gravity and a Carrollian Coulomb gas description, thereby providing a promising route toward the quantization of flat holography.