No Arabic abstract
It is shown that a general radial conformal Killing vector in Minkowski space-time can be associated to a generator of time evolution in conformal quantum mechanics. Among these conformal Killing vectors one finds a class which maps causal diamonds in Minkowski space-time into themselves. The flow of such Killing vectors describes worldlines of accelerated observers with a finite lifetime within the causal diamond. Time evolution of static diamond observers is equivalent to time evolution in conformal quantum mechanics governed by a hyperbolic Hamiltonian and covering only a segment of the time axis. This indicates that the Unruh temperature perceived by static diamond observers in the vacuum state of inertial observers in Minkowski space can be obtained from the behaviour of the two-point functions of conformal quantum mechanics.
We study the covariant phase space of vacuum general relativity at the null boundary of causal diamonds. The past and future components of such a null boundary each have an infinite-dimensional symmetry algebra consisting of diffeomorphisms of the $2$-sphere and boost supertranslations corresponding to angle-dependent rescalings of affine parameter along the null generators. Associated to these symmetries are charges and fluxes obtained from the covariant phase space formalism using the prescription of Wald and Zoupas. By analyzing the behavior of the spacetime metric near the corners of the causal diamond, we show that the fluxes are also Hamiltonian generators of the symmetries on the phase space. In particular, the supertranslation fluxes yield an infinite family of boost Hamiltonians acting on the gravitational data of causal diamonds. We show that the smoothness of the vector fields representing such symmetries at the bifurcation edge of the causal diamond implies suitable matching conditions between the symmetries on the past and future components of the null boundary. Similarly, the smoothness of the spacetime metric implies that the fluxes of all such symmetries is conserved between the past and future components of the null boundary. This establishes an infinite set of conservation laws for finite subregions in gravity analogous to those at null infinity. We also show that the symmetry algebra at the causal diamond has a non-trivial center corresponding to constant boosts. The central charges associated to these constant boosts are proportional to the area of the bifurcation edge, for any causal diamond, in analogy with the Wald entropy formula.
In this paper, a version of polymer quantum mechanics, which is inspired by loop quantum gravity, is considered and shown to be equivalent, in a precise sense, to the standard, experimentally tested, Schroedinger quantum mechanics. The kinematical cornerstone of our framework is the so called polymer representation of the Heisenberg-Weyl (H-W) algebra, which is the starting point of the construction. The dynamics is constructed as a continuum limit of effective theories characterized by a scale, and requires a renormalization of the inner product. The result is a physical Hilbert space in which the continuum Hamiltonian can be represented and that is unitarily equivalent to the Schroedinger representation of quantum mechanics. As a concrete implementation of our formalism, the simple harmonic oscillator is fully developed.
An atom falling freely into a Kerr black hole in a Boulware-like vacuum is shown to emit radiation with a Planck spectrum at the Hawking temperature. For a cloud of falling atoms with random initial times, the radiation is thermal. The existence of this radiation is due to the acceleration of the vacuum field modes with respect to the falling atom. Its properties can be traced to the dominant role of conformal quantum mechanics (CQM) in the neighborhood of the event horizon. We display this effect for a scalar field, though the acceleration radiation has a universal conformal behavior that is exhibited by all fields in the background of generic black holes.
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.
The Generalized Uncertainty Principle (GUP) has been directly applied to the motion of (macroscopic) test bodies on a given space-time in order to compute corrections to the classical orbits predicted in Newtonian Mechanics or General Relativity. These corrections generically violate the Equivalence Principle. The GUP has also been indirectly applied to the gravitational source by relating the GUP modified Hawking temperature to a deformation of the background metric. Such a deformed background metric determines new geodesic motions without violating the Equivalence Principle. We point out here that the two effects are mutually exclusive when compared with experimental bounds. Moreover, the former stems from modified Poisson brackets obtained from a wrong classical limit of the deformed canonical commutators.