English

Quantum Topologically Massive Gravity in de Sitter Space

High Energy Physics - Theory 2011-11-23 v2 General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology

Abstract

We consider three dimensional gravity with a positive cosmological constant and non- zero gravitational Chern-Simons term. This theory has inflating de Sitter solutions and local metric degrees of freedom. The Euclidean signature partition function of the theory is evaluated including both perturbative and non-perturbative corrections. The perturbative one-loop correction is computed using heat kernel techniques. The non- perturbative corrections come from gravitational instantons with non-trivial topology which can be enumerated explicitly. We compute the sum over an infinite class of ge- ometries and show that, unlike the case of pure Einstein gravity, the partition function is finite. This demonstrates that the inclusion of non-trivial local degrees of freedom can render the sum over geometries convergent.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1105.4733,
  title  = {Quantum Topologically Massive Gravity in de Sitter Space},
  author = {Alejandra Castro and Nima Lashkari and Alexander Maloney},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1105.4733},
  year   = {2011}
}

Comments

25 pages, 1 figure; v2: minor corrections

R2 v1 2026-06-21T18:11:44.768Z