Quantum Gravity

We present results from a study of Euclidean dynamical triangulations in an attempt to make contact with Weinberg's asymptotic safety scenario. We find that a fine-tuning is necessary in order to recover semiclassical behavior, and that once this tuning is performed, our simulations provide evidence in support of the asymptotic safety scenario for gravity.  We discuss our motivation for the tuning and present our numerical results. Finally, we discuss what our simulations imply for the dimension of the ultraviolet critical surface, which sets the number of free parameters in the theory.

In the geometric models of matter, proposed in a joint paper with Michael Atiyah and Nick Manton, static particles like the electron or proton are modelled by Riemannian 4-manifolds. In this talk I will explain how the spin degrees of freedom appear in the geometric framework. I will also discuss a proposal for time evolution in one particular model, namely the Taub-NUT model of the electron.

In the geometric models of matter, proposed in a joint paper with Michael Atiyah and Nick Manton, static particles like the electron or proton are modelled by Riemannian 4-manifolds. In this talk I will explain how the spin degrees of freedom appear in the geometric framework. I will also discuss a proposal for time evolution in one particular model, namely the Taub-NUT model of the electron.

 

The fact that the Einstein-Hilbert action, by itself, does not lead to a well-posed variational principle has become textbook knowledge. It can be made well-posed by the addition of suitable boundary terms. There are many boundary terms available in the literature, of which the most famous and most widely used is the Gibbons-Hawking-York (GHY) boundary term. The GHY term is ostensibly defined only for a non-null boundary. There have been very few efforts in the literature to extend its definition to null boundaries. The speaker will present his group's work towards finding a boundary term to render the Einstein-Hilbert action well-posed in the presence of null boundaries. He shall discuss a proposed boundary term, associated boundary conditions, outstanding issues and possible applications.

I will present recent result on constructing effective quantum gravity theory as a locally covariant QFT. The approach I advocate uses the BV formalism for dealing with the gauge freedom and Epstein-Glaser renormalization to control the UV divergences. I will show how gauge invariant observables that satisfy a weak notion of locality can be constructed in this framework and I will sketch the argument for perturbative background independence. Recently these ideas were applied to models relevant in cosmology.

In this talk I discuss the effects of nonlinear backreaction of small scale density inhomogeneities in general relativistic cosmology. It has been proposed that in an inhomogeneous universe, nonlinear terms in the Einstein equation could, if properly averaged and taken into account, affect the large scale Friedmannian evolution of the universe. In particular, it was hoped that these terms might mimic a cosmological constant and eliminate the need for dark energy. After reviewing some of these approaches, and some of their flaws, I will describe a perturbative framework (developed with R. Wald) designed to properly take into account these effects. In our framework, we assume that the spacetime metric is "close"---within 1 part in 10^4, except near strong field objects---to a background metric of FLRW symmetry, but we do not assume that the background metric satisfies the Friedmann equation. We also do not require that spacetime derivatives of the metric be close to derivatives of the background metric. This allows for significant deviations in geodesics, and very large curvature inhomogeneities. A priori, this framework also allows for significant backreaction, which would take the form of new effective matter sources in the Friedmann equation. Nevertheless, we prove that if the matter stress-energy tensor satisfies the weak energy condition, then large matter inhomogeneities on small scales cannot produce significant backreaction effects on large scales, and in particular cannot account for dark energy. As I will also review here, with a suitable ‘dictionary,’ Newtonian cosmologies provide excellent approximations to cosmological solutions to Einsteinʼs equation (with dust and a cosmological constant) on all scales. Our results thereby provide strong justification for the mathematical consistency and validity of the LCDM model within the context of general relativistic cosmology. While our rigorous framework makes use of 1-parameter families and weak limits, in this talk I will provide a simple heuristic discussion that places emphasis on the manner in which "averaging" is done, and the fact that one is solving the Einstein equation.

The precise determination of the entanglement of an interacting quantum many-body systems is now appreciated as an indispensable tool to identify the fundamental character of the ground state of such systems. This is particularly true for unconventional ground states harbouring non-local topological order or so-called quantum spin liquids that evade a standard description in terms of correlation functions. With the entanglement entropy emerging as one of the central measures of entanglement, recent progress has focused on a precise characterization of its scaling behaviour, in particular in the determination of (subleading) corrections to the prevalent boundary-law. 

In the past years, much progress has been made for certain spin, bosonic, and even fermionic quantum many-body systems. However, a large class of interacting models is thought to be exempt from numerical studies due to the fermion sign problem. At its heart, it occurs when the statistical weights in the simulation are positive and negative resulting in an exponential scaling of the algorithm instead of a polynomial one. In this work, we study the connection of the sign problem and the entanglement entropy using Determinantal Quantum Monte Carlo, the method of choice for unbiased, large-scale simulations of fermionic systems. We show that there is a strong correlation between the behavior of the entanglement entropy and the sign problem and that the particular structure of the ‘observable’ entanglement entropy to some extent allows to handle the sign problem much better than for usual correlation functions.

The collection of all Dirac operators for a given fermion space defines its space of geometries. 
Formally integrating over this space of geometries can be used to define a path integral and a thus a theory of quantum gravity. 
In general this expression is complicated, however for fuzzy spaces a simple expression for the general form of the Dirac operator exists. This simple expression allows us to explore the space of geometries using Markov Chain Monte Carlo methods and thus examine the path integral in a manner similar to that used in CDT. 
In doing this we find a phase transition and indications that the geometries close to this phase transition might be manifold like.

In this talk I will sketch the relation between unitary representations of the BMS3 group and three-dimensional, asymptotically flat gravity. More precisely, after giving an exact definition of the BMS group in three dimensions, I will argue that its unitary representations are classified by orbits of CFT stress tensors under conformal transformations. These stress tensors, in turn, can be interpreted as Bondi mass aspects for asymptotically flat metrics. I will also show how one can compute characters of the BMS3 group, which coincide with suitable gravitational one-loop partition functions

I will present a generalization of the spinor approach of Euclidean loop quantum gravity to the 3D Lorentzian case, where the gauge group is the noncompact SU(1,1). The key tool of this generalization is the recoupling theory between unitary infinite-dimensional representations and non-unitary finite-dimensional ones, needed to generalize the Wigner-Eckart theorem to tensor operators for SU(1,1).
SU(1,1) tensor operators are used to build observables and a quantum Hamiltonian constraint, analogous to the one introduced by Bonzom and Livine in the Euclidean case. I will show that the Lorentzian Ponzano-Regge amplitude is a solution of the Hamiltonian constraint, by making use of the Biedenharn-Elliott relations (generalized to the case where unitary and non-unitary SU(1,1) representations are coupled to each other).