A short note on dynamics and degrees of freedom in 2d classical gravity

DOI10.1007/S10714-020-2662-7zbMATH Open1437.83090arXiv1612.04097OpenAlexW2563781937MaRDI QIDQ2295005FDOQ2295005

Corinne de Lacroix, Harold Erbin

Publication date: 12 February 2020

Published in: General Relativity and Gravitation (Search for Journal in Brave)

Abstract: We comment on some peculiarities of matter with and without Weyl invariance coupled to classical $2d$ Einstein-Hilbert gravity for several models, in particular, related to the counting of degrees of freedom and on the dynamics. We find that theories where the matter action is Weyl invariant has generically more degrees of freedom than action without the invariance. This follows from the Weyl invariance of the metric equations of motion independently of the invariance of the action. Then, we study another set of models with scalar fields and show that solutions to the equations of motion are either trivial or inconsistent. To our knowledge, these aspects of classical $2d$ gravity have not been put forward and can be interesting to be remembered when using it as a toy model for $4d$ gravity. The goal of this note is also as a pedagogical exercise: our results follow from standard methods, but we emphasize more direct computations.

Full work available at URL: https://arxiv.org/abs/1612.04097

zbMATH Keywords

degrees of freedomclassical gravity\(2d\) gravityfield theory on curved space

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Methods of quantum field theory in general relativity and gravitational theory (83C47) Relativistic gravitational theories other than Einstein's, including asymmetric field theories (83D05) Analogues of general relativity in lower dimensions (83C80) Applications of global analysis to the sciences (58Z05)

Cites Work

• Weyl gauging and conformal invariance
• Consistent interactions and involution
• Gravitational actions in two dimensions and the Mabuchi functional
• Title not available (Why is that?)
• Weyl vs. conformal
• Dimension and dimensional reduction in quantum gravity
• 2D quantum gravity on compact Riemann surfaces with non-conformal matter
• Weyl versus conformal invariance in quantum field theory
• Mabuchi spectrum from the minisuperspace
• Minisuperspace computation of the Mabuchi spectrum

Cited In (1)

• Gravitational action for a massive Majorana fermion in \(2d\) quantum gravity

This page was built for publication: A short note on dynamics and degrees of freedom in \(2d\) classical gravity

Report a bug (only for logged in users!)Click here to report a bug for this page (MaRDI item Q2295005)