Carroll versus Galilei from a Brane Perspective

TL;DR

This paper extends the known Galilei–Carroll duality from particles to $p$-branes by adopting a brane-based decomposition into longitudinal and transverse directions and employing a formal map that exchanges these directions. Crucially, this Carroll–Galilei map commutes with the Lie algebra expansion of the Poincaré algebra, allowing Carroll gravity actions to be generated from Galilei results at multiple orders and for central extensions. The authors construct several new Carroll gravity actions in 3D and 4D, both for standard and extended algebras, and analyze the symmetry between Carroll and Galilei at the level of $p$-brane sigma models, including cases with (non-)central charges and Wess–Zumino couplings. The work offers a unified framework for ultra-relativistic and non-relativistic brane dynamics and suggests rich avenues for future exploration, such as AdS/CFT contexts and supersymmetric extensions.

Abstract

We show that our previous work on Galilei and Carroll gravity, apt for particles, can be generalized to Galilei and Carroll gravity theories adapted to p-branes (p = 0, 1, 2, ...). Within this wider brane perspective, we make use of a formal map, given in the literature, between the corresponding p-brane Carroll and Galilei algebras where the index describing the directions longitudinal (transverse) to the Galilei brane is interchanged with the index covering the directions transverse (longitudinal) to the Carroll brane with the understanding that the time coordinate is always among the longitudinal directions. This leads among other things in 3D to a map between Galilei particles and Carroll strings and in 4D to a similar map between Galilei strings and Carroll strings. We show that this formal map extends to the corresponding Lie algebra expansion of the Poincaré algebra and, therefore, to several extensions of the Carroll and Galilei algebras including central extensions. We use this formal map to construct several new examples of Carroll gravity actions. Furthermore, we discuss the symmetry between Carroll and Galilei at the level of the p-brane sigma model action and apply this formal symmetry to give several examples of 3D and 4D particles and strings in a curved Carroll background.