English

Toller matrices and the Feynman $i\varepsilon$ in spinfoams

General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology 2026-04-29 v1 High Energy Physics - Theory Mathematical Physics math.MP

Abstract

We study the analytic properties and three equivalent representations of the Toller matrices T(±)T^{(\pm)} which appear in the causal formulation of spinfoam transition amplitudes for 4d Lorentzian quantum gravity. These are polynomially bounded functions on the Lorentz group which satisfy the relation T(+)+T()=DT^{(+)}+T^{(-)}=D, where the Wigner matrix DD provides a unitary irreducible representation of SL(2,C)SL(2,C). Ruhl's definition of T(±)T^{(\pm)} in terms of analyticity and asymptotic properties is shown to be equivalent to the recently introduced Feynman iεi\varepsilon prescription in spinfoams. We show that, equivalently, they can be represented as an integral over eigenvalues of the boost operator, which results in a sum over residues. The latter reproduces the Wick rotation relating Euclidean Spin(4)Spin(4) to Lorentzian SL(2,C)SL(2,C) spinfoams studied by Dona, Gozzini and Nicotra. We provide explicit expressions in terms of hypergeometric functions and specialize them to the γ\gamma-simple representations relevant for spinfoams.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2604.24945,
  title  = {Toller matrices and the Feynman $i\varepsilon$ in spinfoams},
  author = {Eugenio Bianchi and Chaosong Chen and Mauricio Gamonal},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2604.24945},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

22 pages, 3 figures, 3 tables