Self-dual gravity and the chiral model

Abstract

The self-dual Einstein equation (SDE) is shown to be equivalent to the two dimensional chiral model, with gauge group chosen as the group of area preserving diffeomorphisms of a two dimensional surface. The approach given here leads to an analog of the Plebanski equations for general self-dual metrics, and to a natural Hamiltonian formulation of the SDE, namely that of the chiral model.