Gas of wormholes: A possible ground state of quantum gravity (Q1596228)

Since the development of general relativity, gravity plays a central role of determining the structure of space-time. In classical physics, the vacuum has the simple structure of being flat. The central question is what about the structure in quantum physics. The purpose of the paper under review is to provide an account of an investigation on a possible quantum gravity ground state. The starting point is the realization of quantum gravity as a non-Abelian gauge theory whose gauge group is formed by the Poincaré group. The authors of the present paper explore the possibility that the energy density of the quantum fluctuations of the gravitational field around a non-trivial classical solution of Einstein's field equations for the vacuum could be lower than the energy of the perturbative ground state. Their method is a variational calculation of the energy of the quantum gravitational field in an open space, as measured by an asymptotic observer living in an asymptotically flat space-time. As a result of these calculations, flat space-time becomes essentially unstable in the sense that upon it no stable quantum dynamics can be realized.