Quantum Topologically Massive Gravity in de Sitter Space
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.
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