English

Particle propagators on discrete spacetime

High Energy Physics - Theory 2008-11-26 v2 General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology

Abstract

A quantum mechanical description of particle propagation on the discrete spacetime of a causal set is presented. The model involves a discrete path integral in which trajectories within the causal set are summed over to obtain a particle propagator. The sum-over-trajectories is achieved by a matrix geometric series. For causal sets generated by sprinkling points into 1+1 and 3+1 dimensional Minkowski spacetime the propagator calculated on the causal set is shown to agree, in a suitable sense, with the causal retarded propagator for the Klein-Gordon equation. The particle propagator described here is a step towards quantum field theory on causal set spacetime.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.0806.3083,
  title  = {Particle propagators on discrete spacetime},
  author = {Steven Johnston},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0806.3083},
  year   = {2008}
}

Comments

14 pages, no figures. Minor updates to match published version

R2 v1 2026-06-21T10:52:15.148Z