English

Spacetime Curvature in terms of Scalar Field Propagators

General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology 2016-03-02 v1 High Energy Physics - Theory Mathematical Physics math.MP

Abstract

We show how quantum fields can be used to measure the curvature of spacetime. In particular, we find that knowledge of the imprint that spacetime curvature leaves in the correlators of quantum fields suffices, in principle, to reconstruct the metric. We then consider the possibility that the quantum fields obey a natural ultraviolet cutoff, for example, at the Planck scale. We investigate how such a cutoff limits the spatial resolution with which curvature can be deduced from the properties of quantum fields. We find that the metric deduced from the quantum correlator exhibits a peculiar scaling behavior as the scale of the natural UV cutoff is approached.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1510.02725,
  title  = {Spacetime Curvature in terms of Scalar Field Propagators},
  author = {Mehdi Saravani and Siavash Aslanbeigi and Achim Kempf},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1510.02725},
  year   = {2016}
}