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Quantum Gravity and the Dimension of Space-Time

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Quantum Gravity and the Dimension of Space-Time ENRAGE Newsletter Number 1, November 2006 Quantum Gravity and the Dimension of Space-time We all have rather definite notions of what ing quantum mechanics so we also expect that the dimension means but these have to be ex- extrapolation back to the Big Bang using general rel- tended when we consider objects such as frac- ativity, which is a classical field theory, will fail at tals. Gravity directly determines the structure some point. In other words, in order to understand of space time and quantum effects can make fully the Big Bang we expect that it is necessary to determination of its dimension a non-trivial is- have a theory of gravitation which is fully quantum sue. mechanical. From the theoretical point of view there are other Bergfinnur Durhuus1, Thordur Jonsson2 and John F motivations for pursuing a quantum theory of grav- Wheater3 ity. Ever since classical electromagnetism and quan- tum mechanics were combined into quantum electro- dynamics theorists have believed that there must be Why quantum gravity? some way of doing the same with the theory of grav- ity. That belief has only been strengthened by the For ninety years our understanding of gravitational successes of electroweak theory and of QCD, the the- physics has been based on the general theory of rel- ory of the strong interactions. However gravity has ativity which accurately describes many phenomena proved extraordinarily resistant to consistent quanti- occuring at very different distance scales: from the zation and even today, after many decades of effort, gravitational red-shift of light observed in the labo- research on the topic continues. ratory experiment of Pound and Rebka; through the precession of the perihelion of Mercury; to the evolu- tion of the universe and the cosmic microwave back- Models of quantum gravity ground. More recently discrepancies have been found in large distance physics and at present these are the Many different ways of formulating quantum gravity subject of intense activity. We do not know for sure have been investigated; some, in particular string the- what will have to be modified; whether general rela- ory, have attracted more attention than others but tivity itself or just the parameters of the theory. On none is entirely satisfactory. This article describes the other hand if general relativity is used to evolve some of the work being done by the ENRAGE Re- our observations of the universe back in time we reach search Training Network within the discretised ap- the conclusion that there was a Big Bang and that in proach which is explained in more detail below 1. EN- the era immediately afterwards the universe was in- RAGE also works on causal set theory 2, and other credibly small – in fact much smaller than an atom. researchers study loop quantum gravity 3. We should This leads to another sort of problem; things the size note that the bibliography in this article is neither in- of atoms cannot be understood properly without us- tended to be exhaustive nor to record the historical 1Mathematics Institute, University of Copenhagen 2Science Institute, University of Iceland 3Department of Physics, University of Oxford ENRAGE Newsletter Number 1, November 2006 development of the subject; many relevant references metric we can identify the Ricci scalar R in this con- can be found in the bibliographies of the works cited struction. It is simply proportional to the deficit angle here. for parallel transport around a closed loop divided by In classical general relativity the dynamical degree a2; since all the triangles are equilateral the deficit an- π of freedom is the metric tensor gµν . The metric satis- gle at site i is simply given by (6 − ni) 3 where ni is the fies Einstein’s equations that relate it to the energy- number of triangles which have i as a vertex. Many momentum tensor describing the matter which is the objects of interest have been calculated in this partic- source of gravitation. So for any given set of consis- ular model which is often known as ‘two-dimensional tent initial conditions there is just one unique evolu- euclidean quantum gravity’. tion of the metric in time, just as a particle follows a The idea can be extended to space-times of three particular path in classical physics. When the parti- and four dimensions and to lorentzian space-times; cle motion is quantised the single classical trajectory unfortunately it becomes progressively more difficult from point A at t = 0 to B at time t is replaced by with increasing dimension to obtain analytic results an amplitude that the particle starting at A ends up in these models although much has been learned by at B. This amplitude is given by a sum over the set doing numerical simulations 4,5. Our interest is in ob- P of all possible paths from (A, 0) to (B, t) taining analytic results so the rest of this article con- X cerns low dimensional models. hB, t| A, t = 0i = exp(iSp/¯h), (1) p∈P where Sp is the action for the path p. Extending this naively to the gravitational case we expect the metric Dimension A B to evolve from gµν at t = 0 to gµν at t with amplitude X A moment’s thought will show that many of the tri- hg , t| g , t = 0i = exp(iSg/¯h), (2) B A angulations contributing to T are highly irregular. So g∈G although they are locally two-dimensional they might where G is the set of all possible metrics satisfying have global properties that are quite different, as do g = gA at t = 0 and g = gB at t, and Sg is the fractal graphs, and on the average the properties of action (the natural choice for which is the Einstein T may show little resemblance to a smooth flat two- action which in two dimensions consists of the cos- dimensional space. These differences can be charac- mological constant term alone). Note that we have terised to some extent through ‘dimensions’ which made a number of assumptions here concerning the probe different aspects of the space; usually these consistent definition of t. quantities are defined so that they all give the same To evaluate the amplitude (2) requires a system- result for smooth flat spaces (eg 2 for R2). We will atic way of describing the set G. The discretized ran- be concerned with just two of them: the Hausdorff 1 dom surface is one way of doing this . For simplicity dimension dh and the spectral dimension ds. consider a two-dimensional manifold with euclidean The Hausdorff dimension d is a measure of the metric (so this is not really gravity which should have h volume growth. Let V0(r) be the number of points a lorentzian metric) and spherical topology. Disre- within a distance r (defined as in the previous sec- garding the metric for a moment such a manifold can tion) of the point 0; then be triangulated with N ≥ 4 triangles; the idea is that by taking N → ∞ in an appropriate way we can re- dh cover a continuum space. The trick is then to asso- hV0(r)iµ ∼ const r . (4) ciate a triangulation with a metric in the following way: we suppose that all triangles are equilateral of Note that this definition leads to dh = 1 for a line, 2 side a and define the geodesic distance between any dh = 2 for R etc. In the case of the triangulations two points as La where L is the number of links in of the sphere it was proved by Chassaing and Scha- 6 7,8 the shortest path connecting them. Then every dis- effer and by Angel and Schramm that dh = 4, tinct triangulation T leads to a distinct metric and a result that had been known, albeit less rigorously, the vacuum amplitude is given by to physicists for many years 9. This value requires X some explanation. The point is that the structure of Z = exp(−ST ) (3) the typical graph with an infinite number of points T ∈T is highly branched – it consists of an infinite tube where T is the set of all distinct triangulations of the whose diameter goes roughly like r2 with many finite sphere and we have now set ¯h = 1. As well as the outgrowths branching out of it: 2 ENRAGE Newsletter Number 1, November 2006 After a long time t has elapsed the probability that the walker is back at the starting point is given by const p(t) ∼ . (5) tds/2 It is known that for spaces with scalar curvature R ≥ 0 everywhere ds = dh. So for example we have the famous √1 return probability for random walk on t a line. However spaces with branching, such as combs and trees, necessarily have R < 0 at the branching points and ds can be different from dh. The work we have been doing recently has been to determine ds for some of these models with branching. As was proved by Angel most of the volume is in the Combs outgrowths and this is what makes dh = 4. This branching structure rather suggests that it might be worthwhile studying simpler sets of graphs with an The spectral dimension of several ensembles of combs 12 infinite spine such as trees: is investigated in detail in where proofs of all the statements made here can be found. In that paper we made a particular point of finding methods that were as elementary as possible and avoided the use of heavy mathematical machinery. The important point to appreciate is that, from r0 s1 s2 s3 the quantum gravity motivation where we started, we are not interested in the properties of any one graph but in the average properties of the whole ensemble.
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