English

A proper-time cure for the conformal sickness in quantum gravity

High Energy Physics - Theory 2011-07-18 v2 General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology

Abstract

Starting from the space of Lorentzian metrics, we examine the full gravitational path integral in 3 and 4 space-time dimensions. Inspired by recent results obtained in a regularized, dynamically triangulated formulation of Lorentzian gravity, we gauge-fix to proper-time coordinates and perform a non-perturbative ``Wick rotation'' on the physical configuration space. Under certain assumptions about the behaviour of the partition function under renormalization, we find that the divergence due to the conformal modes of the metric is cancelled non-perturbatively by a Faddeev-Popov determinant contributing to the effective measure. We illustrate some of our claims by a 3d perturbative calculation.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.hep-th/0103186,
  title  = {A proper-time cure for the conformal sickness in quantum gravity},
  author = {A. Dasgupta and R. Loll},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:hep-th/0103186},
  year   = {2011}
}

Comments

25 pages, 1 postscript figure; version to appear in Nucl. Phys. B with an added reference and a comment

R2 v1 2026-07-22T15:03:07.401Z