Toward a classification of conformal hypersurface invariants

Abstract

Hypersurfaces embedded in conformal manifolds appear frequently as boundary data in boundary-value problems in cosmology and string theory. Viewed as the non-null conformal infinity of a spacetime, we consider hypersurfaces embedded in a Riemannian (or Lorentzian) conformal manifold. We construct a finite and minimal family of hypersurface tensors—the curvatures intrinsic to the hypersurface and the so-called “conformal fundamental forms”—that can be used to construct natural conformal invariants of the hypersurface embedding up to a fixed order in hypersurface-orthogonal derivatives of the bulk metric. We thus show that these conformal fundamental forms capture the extrinsic embedding data of a conformal infinity in a spacetime.