Note on the symplectic structure of asymptotically flat gravity and BMS symmetries

Abstract

The Poisson brackets of the gravitational field at null infinity play a pivotal role in establishing the equivalence between the Ward identities involving BMS charges and the soft graviton theorem. In recent literature it was noticed that, in order to reproduce the action of BMS transformations via such Poisson brackets, one needs to add ad-hoc boundary terms in the symplectic form. In this note we show that, introducing a suitable splitting of the gravitational field in bulk and boundary degrees of freedom and using techniques of covariant phase space formalism, it is possible to obtain the correct Poisson brackets between the boundary fields without any additional assumption. The same Poisson brackets are used to show that BMS charges canonically generate BMS transformations on the gravitational phase space.