Theoretical Physics Seminar

In the present ongoing work, we are currently developing the study of gravitational radiation in asymptotically flat spacetimes through the use of tractor calculus. Tractor calculus is the natural invariant calculus on conformal manifolds. We develop in particular, the necessary tractor calculus of the conformal boundary of asymptotically flat spacetimes. That is, we construct the appropriate intrinsic notion of a tractor bundle and a well defined intrinsic tractor connection on null infinity . This has been achieved by introducing an additional piece of data called the Weyl connection, apart from the metric and its usual Levi-Civita connection. The difference between two distinct tractor derivative operators on well-defined intrinsic tractors at null infinity encode the shear and the News tensor. We then study the curvature of such a tractor connection and see how it encodes information about gravitational radiation.