BMS characters and modular invariance

Abstract

Abstract We construct the characters for the highest weight representations of the 3d Bondi-Metzner-Sachs (BMS3) algebra. We reproduce our character formula by looking at singular limits from 2d CFT characters and find that our answers are identical to the characters obtained for the very different induced representations. We offer an algebraic explanation to this arising from an automorphism in the parent 2d CFT. We then use the characters to construct the partition function and show how to use BMS modular transformations to obtain a density of primary states. The entropy thus obtained accounts for the principal part of the entropy obtained from the BMS-Cardy formula. This suggests that BMS primaries capture most of the entropy of Flat Space Cosmologies, which are the flatspace analogues of BTZ black holes in AdS3.