Spontaneous symmetry breaking in loop quantum gravity

DOI10.1088/0264-9381/25/23/235010zbMATH Open1155.83338arXiv0806.3356OpenAlexW3106518867MaRDI QIDQ5302157

Publication date: 6 January 2009

Published in: Classical and Quantum Gravity (Search for Journal in Brave)

Abstract: In this paper we investigate the question how spontaneous symmetry breaking works in the framework of Loop Quantum Gravity and we compare it to the results obtained in the case of the Proca field, where we were able to quantise the theory in Loop Quantum Gravity without introducing a Higgs field. We obtained that the Hamiltonian of the two systems are very similar, the only difference is an extra scalar field in the case of spontaneous symmetry breaking. This field can be identified as the field that carries the mass of the vector field. In the quantum regime this becomes a well defined operator, which turns out to be a self adjoint operator with continuous spectrum. To calculate the spectrum we used a new representation in the case of the scalar fields, which in addition enabled us to rewrite the constraint equations to a finite system of linear partial differential equations. This made it possible to solve part of the constraints explicitly.

Full work available at URL: https://arxiv.org/abs/0806.3356

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Quantization of the gravitational field (83C45) Einstein's equations (general structure, canonical formalism, Cauchy problems) (83C05)