A unified expansion of Einstein's gravity

Abstract

Non-Lorentzian theories of gravity, most common of which are Galilean and Carrollian gravity, arise from General relativity under suitable scalings. General relativity can be obtained by gauging the Poincar\'e algebra. A convenient formulation of non-Lorentzian gravity follows the contraction of the Poincar\'e algebra in the tangent space to its non-Lorentzian counterparts, e.g. Galilean and Carrollian algebras. In existing literature, different non-Lorentzian theories of gravity have been addressed separately. In this paper, we introduce a single unified framework of expansion to address all these different theories. We show that different scalings can be unified into a single covariant form parametrized by $(s,n)$, alongside the contraction parameter $\epsilon$. Keeping these parameters unfixed in the limit $\epsilon \to 0$ defines a $\textit{unified flat geometry}$ and its $\textit{unified algebra}$, which reduces to a specific non-Lorentzian geometry for a particular choice of $s$ and $n$. Using this setup in the tangent space, we systematically expand the Einstein-Hilbert action in even powers of $\epsilon$, which we call a $\textit{unified expansion}$ of Einstein's gravity, whose leading-order theory is fixed by $(s,n)$. This reproduces various classes of gravitational theories, including Einstein gravity (the trivial case), Galilean gravity, Carroll gravity, all of which can be extracted from this expansion. Using the expansion, we then formulate String Carroll (SC) gravity, where the local metric has two vanishing eigenvalues. The near-horizon region of generic non-extremal black holes has been recently shown to be a SC geometry. By considering explicit examples, we confirm that these near-horizon geometries constitute solutions of SC gravity, paving the way of understanding physics near the horizon of generic black holes in terms of SC gravity.