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BMS in Cosmology

Symmetries play an interesting role in cosmology. They are useful in characterizing the cosmological perturbations generated during inflation and lead to consistency relations involving the soft limit of the statistical correlators of large-scale structure dark matter and galaxies overdensities. On the other hand, in observational cosmology the carriers of the information about these large-scale statistical distributions are light rays traveling on null geodesics. Motivated by this simple consideration, we study the structure of null infinity and the associated BMS symmetry in a cosmological setting. For decelerating Friedmann-Robertson-Walker backgrounds, for which future null infinity exists, we find that the BMS transformations which leaves the asymptotic metric invariant to leading order. Contrary to the asymptotic flat case, the BMS transformations in cosmology generate Goldstone modes corresponding to both scalar and tensor degrees of freedom which may exist at null infinity and perturb the asymptotic data. Therefore, BMS transformations generate physically inequivalent vacua as they populate the universe at null infinity with these physical degrees of freedom. We also discus