English

Background independent duals of the harmonic oscillator

High Energy Physics - Theory 2009-11-11 v2 General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology

Abstract

We show that a class of topological field theories are quantum duals of the harmonic oscillator. This is demonstrated by establishing a correspondence between the creation and annihilation operators and non-local gauge invariant observables of the topological field theory. The example is used to discuss some issues concerning background independence and the relation of vacuum energy to the problem of time in quantum gravity.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.hep-th/0511131,
  title  = {Background independent duals of the harmonic oscillator},
  author = {Viqar Husain},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:hep-th/0511131},
  year   = {2009}
}

Comments

4 pages, version to appear in PRL