On Gauss-Bonnet gravity and boundary conditions in Lorentzian path-integral quantization

DOI10.1007/JHEP05(2021)273MaRDI QIDQ2048097zbMATH OpenOpenAlexWikidataFDO

Authors Gaurav Narain

Publication date 4 August 2021

Published in Journal of High Energy Physics (Search for Journal in Brave)

Copyright license Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International

Full work available at URL https://arxiv.org/abs/2101.04644

zbMATH Keywords

cosmology of theories beyond the SMmodels of quantum gravitynonperturbative effectsspace-time symmetries

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Path integrals in quantum mechanics (81S40) Quantization of the gravitational field (83C45) Relativistic gravitational theories other than Einstein's, including asymmetric field theories (83D05)

Abstract: Recently there has been a surge of interest in studying Lorentzian quantum cosmology using Picard-Lefschetz methods. The present paper aims to explore the Lorentzian path-integral of Gauss-Bonnet gravity in four spacetime dimensions with metric as the field variable. We employ mini-superspace approximation and study the variational problem exploring different boundary conditions. It is seen that for mixed boundary conditions non-trivial effects arise from Gauss-Bonnet sector of gravity leading to additional saddle points for lapse in some case. As an application of this we consider the No-boundary proposal of the Universe with two different settings of boundary conditions, and compute the transition amplitude using Picard-Lefschetz formalism. In first case the transition amplitude is a superposition of a Lorentzian and a Euclidean geometrical configuration leading to interference incorporating non-perturbative effects coming from Gauss-Bonnet sector of gravity. In the second case involving complex initial momentum we note that the transition amplitude is an analogue of Hartle-Hawking wave-function with non-perturbative correction coming from Gauss-Bonnet sector of gravity.

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Cited in

(7)

• Path integrals in quadratic gravity
• Surprises in Lorentzian path-integral of Gauss-Bonnet gravity
• Lorentzian Robin universe
• Lorentzian Robin universe of Gauss-Bonnet gravity
• Complex saddles of charged-AdS gravitational partition function
• Complex Kerr-AdS black holes
• Resolving degeneracies in complex \(\mathbb{R}\times S^3\) and \(\theta\)-KSW

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