Asymptotic Symmetries in the BV-BFV Formalism

We show how to derive asymptotic charges for field theories on manifolds with “asymptotic” boundary, using the BV-BFV formalism. We also prove that the conservation of said charges follows naturally from the vanishing of the BFV boundary action, and show how this construction generalises Noether’s procedure. Using the BV-BFV viewpoint, we resolve the controversy present in the literature, regarding the status of large gauge transformation as symmetries of the asymptotic structure. We show that even though the symplectic structure at the asymptotic boundary is not preserved under these transformations, the failure is governed by the corner data, in agreement with the BV-BFV philosophy. We analyse in detail the case of electrodynamics and the interacting scalar field, for which we present a new type of duality to a sourced two-form model.