No Arabic abstract
We review some of the recent results which can be useful for better understanding of the problem of stability of vacuum and in general classical solutions in higher derivative quantum gravity. The fourth derivative terms in the purely gravitational vacuum sector are requested by renormalizability already in both semiclassical and complete quantum gravity theories. However, because of these terms the spectrum of the theory has unphysical ghost states which jeopardize the stability of classical solutions. At the quantum level ghosts violate unitarity, and and thus ghosts look incompatible with the consistency of the theory. The `dominating or `standard approach is to treat higher derivative terms as small perturbations at low energies. Such an effective theory is supposed to glue with an unknown fundamental theory in the high energy limit. We argue that the perspectives for such a scenario are not clear, to say the least. On the other hand, recently there was certain progress in understanding physical conditions which can make ghosts not offensive. We survey these results and discuss the properties of the unknown fundamental theory which can provide these conditions satisfied.
Maximum entropy principle and Souriaus symplectic generalization of Gibbs states have provided crucial insights leading to extensions of standard equilibrium statistical mechanics and thermodynamics. In this brief contribution, we show how such extensions are instrumental in the setting of discrete quantum gravity, towards providing a covariant statistical framework for the emergence of continuum spacetime. We discuss the significant role played by information-theoretic characterizations of equilibrium. We present the Gibbs state description of the geometry of a tetrahedron and its quantization, thereby providing a statistical description of the characterizing quanta of space in quantum gravity. We use field coherent states for a generalized Gibbs state to write an effective statistical field theory that perturbatively generates 2-complexes, which are discrete spacetime histories in several quantum gravity approaches.
We analyse the classical configurations of a bootstrapped Newtonian potential generated by homogeneous spherically symmetric sources in terms of a quantum coherent state. We first compute how the mass and mean wavelength of these solutions scale in terms of the number of quanta in the coherent state. We then note that the classical relation between the ADM mass and the proper mass of the source naturally gives rise to a Generalised Uncertainty Principle for the size of the gravitational radius in the quantum theory. Consistency of the mass and wavelength scalings with this GUP requires the compactness remains at most of order one even for black holes, and the corpuscular predictions are thus recovered, with the quantised horizon area expressed in terms of the number of quanta in the coherent state. Our findings could be useful for analysing the classicalization of gravity in the presence of matter and the avoidance of singularities in the gravitational collapse of compact sources.
We hereby derive the Newtonian metric potentials for the fourth-derivative gravity including the one-loop logarithm quantum corrections. It is explicitly shown that the behavior of the modified Newtonian potential near the origin is improved respect to the classical one, but this is not enough to remove the curvature singularity in $r=0$. Our result is grounded on a rigorous proof based on numerical and analytic computations.
We study Quantum Gravity effects on the density of states in statistical mechanics and its implications for the critical temperature of a Bose Einstein Condensate and fraction of bosons in its ground state. We also study the effects of compact extra dimensions on the critical temperature and the fraction. We consider both neutral and charged bosons in the study and show that the effects may just be measurable in current and future experiments.
We explicitly construct and characterize all possible independent loop states in 3+1 dimensional loop quantum gravity by regulating it on a 3-d regular lattice in the Hamiltonian formalism. These loop states, characterized by the (dual) angular momentum quantum numbers, describe SU(2) rigid rotators on the links of the lattice. The loop states are constructed using the Schwinger bosons which are harmonic oscillators in the fundamental (spin half) representation of SU(2). Using generalized Wigner Eckart theorem, we compute the matrix elements of the volume operator in the loop basis. Some simple loop eigenstates of the volume operator are explicitly constructed.