High Energy Theory Seminar

In this talk I will discuss a novel mechanism  that couples matter fields to three-dimensional quantum gravity. This construction is based on the Chern-Simons formulation of three-dimensional gravity, and it centers on a collection of Wilson loops winding around spacetime. We coin this object a Wilson spool.  To construct the spool, we build take advantage of representation theory. To evaluate the spool, we adapt and exploit several known exact results in Chern-Simons theory. Our proposal correctly reproduces the one-loop determinant of a massive spinning field on Euclidean dS_3 and AdS_3 as G_N->0. Moreover, allowing for quantum metric fluctuations, it can be systematically evaluated to any order in perturbation theory for de Sitter quantum gravity.  

The talk is in 469 Lauritsen.

Contact [email protected] for Zoom information.