Room P3.10, Mathematics Building

Steven Willison, CENTRA
Gravity as a theory of embedded surfaces

We present a class of isometric embeddings which are fully perturbable and therefore can encode all of the physical degrees of freedom of General Relativity. Assuming a 13+1 dimensional flat ambient space, we can formulate GR, in suitable gauge fixing, as a nonlinear wave equation system in the embedding coordinates. The approach is necessarily background dependent. Some applications and open problems will be discussed.