Adiabatic Solutions in General Relativity as Null Geodesics on the Space of Boundary Diffeomorphisms (2201.01986v1)

Abstract: We use a trick similar to Weinberg's for adiabatic modes, in a Manton approximation for general relativity on manifolds with spatial boundary. This results in a description of the slow-time dependent solutions as null geodesics on the space of boundary diffeomorphisms, with respect to a metric we prove to be composed solely of the boundary data. We show how the solutions in the bulk space is determined with the constraints of general relativity. To give our description a larger perspective, we furthermore identify our resulting Lagrangian as a generalized version of the covariantized Lagrangian for continuum mechanics. We study the cases of 3+1 and 2+1 dimensions and show for the solutions we propose, the Hamiltonian constraint becomes the real homogeneous Monge-Ampere equation in the special case of two spatial dimensions.