Related papers: Path Integral Over Conformally Self-Dual Geometrie…
Higher-order curvature corrections involving the conformally-invariant Weyl-squared action have played a role in two recent investigations of four-dimensional gravity; in critical gravity, where it is added to the standard cosmological…
We present a path integral formalism for quantising gravity in the form of the spectral action. Our basic principle is to sum over all Dirac operators. The approach is demonstrated on two simple finite noncommutative geometries: the…
Self-dual gravity is a diffeomorphism invariant theory in four dimensions that describes two propagating polarisations of the graviton and has a negative mass dimension coupling constant. Nevertheless, this theory is not only renormalisable…
A new method for nonperturbative investigations of quantum gravity is presented in which the simplicial path integral is approximated by the partition function of a spin system. This facilitates analytical and numerical computations…
We revisit Weyl's metrication (geometrization) of electromagnetism. We show that by making Weyl's proposed geometric connection be pure imaginary, not only are we able to metricate electromagnetism, an underlying local conformal invariance…
A classical two dimensional theory of gravity which has a number of interesting features (including a Newtonian limit, black holes and gravitational collapse) is quantized using conformal field theoretic techniques. The critical dimension…
The path-integral measure of linearized gravity around a saddle-point background with the cosmological term is considered in order to study the conformal rotation prescription proposed by Gibbons, Hawking and Perry. It is also argued that…
In this paper, we present a new formulation of topological conformal gravity in four dimensions. Such a theory was first considered by Witten as a possible gravitational counterpart of topological Yang-Mills theory, but several problems…
We study scaling and renormalization in two dimensional quantum gravity in a covariant framework. After reviewing the definition of a proper path integral measure, we use scaling arguments to rederive the KPZ relations, the fractal…
BRST-invariant action of general relativity in the unimodular gauge proposed by Baulieu is studied without using perturbative expansions. The expression for the path integral in the unimodular gauge is reduced to a form in which a…
We study a new two-dimensional quantum gravity theory, based on a gravitational action containing both the familiar Liouville term and the Mabuchi functional, which has been shown to be related to the coupling of non-conformal matter to…
This article gives a comprehensive description of the fractal geometry of conformally-invariant (CI) scaling curves, in the plane or half-plane. It focuses on deriving critical exponents associated with interacting random paths, by…
Two-dimensional quantum gravity, defined either via scaling limits of random discrete surfaces or via Liouville quantum gravity, is known to possess a geometry that is genuinely fractal with a Hausdorff dimension equal to 4. Coupling…
The computation of anomalies in quantum field theory may be carried out by evaluating path integral Jacobians, as first shown by Fujikawa. The evaluation of these Jacobians can be cast in the form of a quantum mechanical problem, whose…
The four-dimensional gauge group of general relativity corresponds to arbitrary coordinate transformations on a four-manifold. Theories of gravity with a dynamical structure remarkably like Einstein's theory can be obtained on the basis of…
After an overview of variational principles for discrete gravity, and on the basis of the approach to conformal transformations in a simplicial PL setting proposed by Luo and Glickenstein, we present at a heuristic level an improved scheme…
We construct a path integral based on the coupling of the Liouville action and the Mabuchi K-energy on a one-dimensional complex manifold. To the best of our knowledge this is the first rigorous construction of such an object and this is…
Quantization of two-dimensional dilaton gravity coupled to conformal matter is investigated. Working in conformal gauge about a fixed background metric, the theory may be viewed as a sigma model whose target space is parameterized by the…
Based on a recent paper by Takhtajan, we propose a formulation of 2D quantum gravity whose basic object is the Liouville action on the Riemann sphere $\Sigma_{0,m+n}$ with both parabolic and elliptic points. The identification of the…
We consider higher dimensional gravity in which the four dimensional spacetime and extra dimensions are not treated on an equal footing. The anisotropy is implemented in the ADM decomposition of higher dimensional metric by requiring the…