English

On the volume simplicity constraint in the EPRL spin foam model

General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology 2018-04-25 v1

Abstract

We propose a quantum version of the quadratic volume simplicity constraint for the EPRL spin foam model. It relies on a formula for the volume of 4-dimensional polyhedra, depending on its bivectors and the knotting class of its boundary graph. While this leads to no further condition for the 4-simplex, the constraint becomes non-trivial for more complicated boundary graphs. We show that, in the semi-classical limit of the hypercuboidal graph, the constraint turns into the geometricity condition observed recently by several authors.

Cite

@article{arxiv.1710.06195,
  title  = {On the volume simplicity constraint in the EPRL spin foam model},
  author = {Benjamin Bahr and Vadim Belov},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1710.06195},
  year   = {2018}
}

Comments

14 pages, 5 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-22T22:16:41.613Z