English

Quantum Gravity from Timelike Liouville theory

High Energy Physics - Theory 2019-11-20 v2 General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology

Abstract

A proper definition of the path integral of quantum gravity has been a long-standing puzzle because the Weyl factor of the Euclidean metric has a wrong-sign kinetic term. We propose a definition of two-dimensional Liouville quantum gravity with cosmological constant using conformal bootstrap for the timelike Liouville theory coupled to supercritical matter. We prove a no-ghost theorem for the states in the BRST cohomology. We show that the four-point function constructed by gluing the timelike Liouville three-point functions is well defined and crossing symmetric (numerically) for external Liouville energies corresponding to \textit{all} physical states in the BRST cohomology with the choice of the Ribault-Santachiara contour for the internal energy.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1905.12689,
  title  = {Quantum Gravity from Timelike Liouville theory},
  author = {Teresa Bautista and Atish Dabholkar and Harold Erbin},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1905.12689},
  year   = {2019}
}

Comments

42 pages

R2 v1 2026-06-23T09:32:15.103Z