The Kerr/CFT energy gap

Abstract

Noether charges in gravity are always defined with respect to a reference metric, but the near-horizon extremal Kerr (NHEK) solution does not come with an obvious choice of reference metric (it is not asymptotically flat, for example). We discuss a one parameter generalization of the NHEK solution due to Kinnersley and Kelley which interpolates between NHEK and an analytically continued version of Minkowski spacetime. We use this interpolating family of solutions to compute the conformal energy of NHEK above the Minkowski reference metric. We find an interesting order of limits issue when computing the conformal energy of the Minkowski vacuum and we discuss a few natural prescriptions for fixing it, including one motivated by the Kerr/CFT correspondence.