About possible measures in quantum gravity
One of the approaches to a quantum theory of gravity makes use of path-integral quantization, where the action is taken to be the Einstein-Hilbert action of general relativity (GR) or the action of a generalized theory of gravity. A central task in this construction is the consistent choice of measure for the sum over fields (including the metric) in the path integral. One may expect that this measure should be free of divergences and also be invariant under the symmetries of the theory (in particular, diffeomorphism invariance). For GR, Fradkin and Vilkovisky [PRD 8 (1973) 4211] presented a measure for which a certain type of divergences (volume divergences proportional to \(\delta^{(4)}(0)\)) cancel out. The present author extends this analysis to quadratic gravity, that is, gravity theories with an action that contains curvature-squared terms. The Fradkin-Vilkovisky measure for this case was constructed by Buchbinder and collaborators [CQG 4 (1987) 1487; ibid. 8 (1991) 1113], but the volume divergences were not considered there. This task is taken by the present author, who is able to show by a long and technical investigation that the volume divergences are cancelled for quadratic gravity, too. One problem for this measure is that it is not invariant with respect to diffeomorphisms, but the author argues that this is not a problem as long as the effective action and the S-matrix calculated from the path integral are invariant. The analysis in this paper does not, of course, prove that this measure is the correct one for quantum gravity, but it shows that it can be considered as a viable candidate worthwhile for further investigation.
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