Potential Carroll Structures and Special Carrollian Manifolds

Abstract: It is well-known that unlike space-like and time-like hypersurfaces, null hypersurfaces in Lorentzian manifolds do not naturally inherit an affine connection from the spacetime in which they are embedded. On the other hand, recent developments in flat-space holography motivate the study of the intrinsic geometry of null hypersurfaces such as null infinity and black hole event horizons. Here we initiate the study of potential Carroll structures, a candidate for an intrinsic description of null hypersurfaces which may be particularly useful in settings where conformal isometries are of interest, and we explore their relationship to another such candidate intrinsic geometry, the special Carrollian manifolds.