English

Fermion spins in loop quantum gravity

General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology 2021-04-07 v2 High Energy Physics - Theory

Abstract

We define and study kinematical observables involving fermion spin, such as the total spin of a collection of particles, in loop quantum gravity. Due to the requirement of gauge invariance, the relevant quantum states contain strong entanglement between gravity and fermionic degrees of freedom. Interestingly we find that properties and spectra of the observables are nevertheless similar to their counterparts from quantum mechanics. However, there are also new effects. Due to the entanglement between gravity and fermionic degrees of freedom, alignment of quantum spins has consequences for quantized geometry. We sketch a particular effect of this kind that may in principle be observable.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2011.00233,
  title  = {Fermion spins in loop quantum gravity},
  author = {Refik Mansuroglu and Hanno Sahlmann},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2011.00233},
  year   = {2021}
}

Comments

17 pages, 5 figures v2: small changes in the text, removed various typos. version essentially identical to the one published in PRD

R2 v1 2026-06-23T19:48:15.866Z