Can causal dynamical triangulations probe factor-ordering issues?
R L Maitra
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12 pages. Presented at the XLIX Cracow School of Theoretical Physics, "Non-perturbative Gravity and Quantum Chromodynamics," Zakopane, Poland, May 31 - June 10, 2009 Version 2, references updated
The causal dynamical triangulations (CDT) program has for the first time allowed for path-integral computation of correlation functions in full general relativity without symmetry reductions and taking into account Lorentzian signature. One of the most exciting recent results in CDT is the strong agreement of these computations with (minisuperspace) path integral calculations in quantum cosmology. Herein I will describe my current project to compute minisuperspace (Friedman-Robertson-Walker) path integrals with a range of different measures corresponding to various factor orderings of the Friedman-Robertson-Walker Hamiltonian. The aim is to compare with CDT results and ask whether CDT can shed light on factor-ordering ambiguities in quantum cosmology models.
Detailed applications of minisuperspace methods are presented and compared with results obtained in recent years by means of causal dynamical triangulations (CDTs), mainly in the form of effective actions. The analysis sheds light on conceptual questions such as the treatment of time or the role and scaling behavior of statistical and quantum fluctuations. In the case of fluctuations, several analytical and numerical results show agreement between the two approaches and offer possible explanations of effects that have been seen in causal dynamical triangulations but whose origin remained uncle…
We investigate the impact of topology on the phase structure of four-dimensional Causal Dynamical Triangulations (CDT). Using numerical Monte Carlo simulations we study CDT with toroidal spatial topology. We confirm existence of all four distinct phases of quantum geometry earlier observed in CDT with spherical spatial topology. We plot the toroidal CDT phase diagram and find that it looks very similar to the case of the spherical spatial topology.
We consider the model of hard dimers coupled to two-dimensional Causal Dynamical Triangulations (CDT) with all dimer types present and solve it exactly subject to a single restriction. Depending on the dimer weights there are, in addition to the usual gravity phase of CDT, two tri-critical and two dense dimer phases. We establish the properties of these phases, computing their cylinder and disk amplitudes, and their scaling limits.
This is a Ph.D. thesis that presents the author's findings in the area of Causal Dynamical Triangulations. In compliance with Jagiellonian University of Kraków regulations, the document consists of six publications and a general summary, which serves as a guide to assist readers in navigating through the publications. Although the six publications that constitute the main content of the thesis are not included in this version of the text on arXiv, they are referred to frequently throughout the document. The original document is available at the following link: https://fais.uj.edu.pl/documents/…
We investigate the geometry of a quantum universe with the topology of the four-torus. The study of non-contractible geodesic loops reveals that a typical quantum geometry consists of a small semi-classical toroidal bulk part, dressed with many outgrowths, which contain most of the four-volume and which have almost spherical topologies, but nevertheless are quite fractal.
This topical review gives a comprehensive overview and assessment of recent results in Causal Dynamical Triangulations (CDT), a modern formulation of lattice gravity, whose aim is to obtain a theory of quantum gravity nonperturbatively from a scaling limit of the lattice-regularized theory. In this manifestly diffeomorphism-invariant approach one has direct, computational access to a Planckian spacetime regime, which is explored with the help of invariant quantum observables. During the last few years, there have been numerous new and important developments and insights concerning the theory's…
We discuss the algorithmic problem of minimal coupling gauge fields of the Yang-Mills type to Quantum Gravity in the approach known as Causal Dynamical Triangulations (CDT) as a step towards studying, ultimately, systems of gravity coupled with bosonic and fermionic matter. We first describe the algorithm for general dimensions and gauge groups and then focus on the results obtained from simulations of 2d CDT coupled to gauge fields with U{(1)} and SU{(2)} gauge groups, where we studied both observables related to gravity and gauge fields, and compared them with analogous simulations in the st…
We propose a new method to characterize the different phases observed in the non-perturbative numerical approach to quantum gravity known as Causal Dynamical Triangulation. The method is based on the analysis of the eigenvalues and the eigenvectors of the Laplace-Beltrami operator computed on the triangulations: it generalizes previous works based on the analysis of diffusive processes and proves capable of providing more detailed information on the geometric properties of the triangulations. In particular, we apply the method to the analysis of spatial slices, showing that the different phase…
Causal Dynamical Triangulations is a non-perturbative quantum gravity model, defined with a lattice cut-off. The model can be viewed as defined with a proper time but with no reference to any three-dimensional spatial background geometry. It has four phases, depending on the parameters (the coupling constants) of the model. The particularly interesting behavior is observed in the so-called de Sitter phase, where the spatial three-volume distribution as a function of proper time has a semi-classical behavior which can be obtained from an effective mini-superspace action. In the case of the thre…
We consider causal 3-dimensional triangulations with the topology of $S^2\times [0,1]$ or $D^2\times [0,1]$ where $S^2$ and $D^2$ are the two-dimensional sphere and disc, respectively. These triangulations consist of slices and we show that these slices can be mapped bijectively onto a set of certain coloured two-dimensional cell complexes satisfying simple conditions. The cell complexes arise as the cross section of the individual slices.
We discuss the discretization of Yang-Mills theories on Dynamical Triangulations in the compact formulation, with gauge fields living on the links of the dual graph associated with the triangulation, and the numerical investigation of the minimally coupled system by Monte Carlo simulations. We provide, in particular, an explicit construction and implementation of the Markov chain moves for 2D Causal Dynamical Triangulations coupled to either $U(1)$ or $SU(2)$ gauge fields; the results of exploratory numerical simulations on a toroidal geometry are also presented for both cases. We study the cr…
We show recent results of the application of spectral analysis in the setting of the Monte Carlo approach to Quantum Gravity known as Causal Dynamical Triangulations (CDT), discussing the behavior of the lowest lying eigenvalues of the Laplace-Beltrami operator computed on spatial slices. This kind of analysis provides information about running scales of the theory and about the critical behaviour around a possible second order transition in the CDT phase diagram, discussing the implications for the continuum limit.
Within the causal dynamical triangulations approach to the quantization of gravity, striking evidence has emerged for the dynamical reduction of spacetime dimension on sufficiently small scales. Specifically, the spectral dimension decreases from the topological value of 4 towards a value near 2 as the scale being probed decreases. The physical scales over which this dimensional reduction occurs have not previously been ascertained. We present and implement a method to determine these scales in units of either the Planck length or the quantum spacetime geometry's effective de Sitter length. We…
This letter discusses phenomenological aspects of dimensional reduction predicted by the Causal Dynamical Triangulations (CDT) approach to quantum gravity. The deformed form of the dispersion relation for the fields defined on the CDT space-time is reconstructed. Using the Fermi satellite observations of the GRB 090510 source we find that the energy scale of the dimensional reduction is $E_* > 0.7 \sqrt{4-d_{\rm UV}} \cdot 10^{10}$ GeV at (95 $\%$ CL), where $d_{\rm UV}$ is the value of the spectral dimension in the UV limit. By applying the deformed dispersion relation to the cosmological per…
Four-dimensional CDT (causal dynamical triangulations) is a lattice theory of geometries which one might use in an attempt to define quantum gravity non-perturbatively, following the standard procedures of lattice field theory. Being a theory of geometries, the phase transitions which in usual lattice field theories are used to define the continuum limit of the lattice theory will in the CDT case be transitions between different types of geometries. This picture is interwoven with the topology of space which is kept fixed in the lattice theory, the reason being that "classical" geometries arou…
The causal structure is a quintessential element of continuum spacetime physics and needs to be properly encoded in a theory of Lorentzian quantum gravity. Established spin foam (and tensorial group field theory (TGFT)) models mostly work with relatively special classes of Lorentzian triangulations (e.g. built from spacelike tetrahedra only), obscuring the explicit implementation of the local causal structure at the microscopic level. We overcome this limitation and construct a full-fledged model for Lorentzian quantum geometry the building blocks of which include spacelike, lightlike and time…
A typical geometry extracted from the path integral of a quantum theory of gravity might be quite complicated in the UV region. Even if such a configuration is not physical, it may be of interest to understand the details of its nature, since some universal features can be important for the physics of the model. If the formalism describing the geometry is coordinate independent, such understanding may be facilitated by the use of suitable coordinate systems. In this article we use scalar fields that solve Laplace's equation to introduce coordinates on geometries with a toroidal topology. Using…