Signature of the simplicial supermetric

DOI10.1088/0264-9381/14/8/013zbMATH Open0877.53064arXivgr-qc/9609028OpenAlexW3100158680MaRDI QIDQ4354801FDOQ4354801

Authors: J. B. Hartle, Warner A. Miller, Ruth M. Williams 

Publication date: 8 December 1997

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

Abstract: We investigate the signature of the Lund-Regge metric on spaces of simplicial three-geometries which are important in some formulations of quantum gravity. Tetrahedra can be joined together to make a three-dimensional piecewise linear manifold. A metric on this manifold is specified by assigning a flat metric to the interior of the tetrahedra and values to their squared edge-lengths. The subset of the space of squared edge-lengths obeying triangle and analogous inequalities is simplicial configuration space. We derive the Lund-Regge metric on simplicial configuration space and show how it provides the shortest distance between simplicial three-geometries among all choices of gauge inside the simplices for defining this metric (Regge gauge freedom). We show analytically that there is always at least one physical timelike direction in simplicial configuration space and provide a lower bound on the number of spacelike directions. We show that in the neighborhood of points in this space corresponding to flat metrics there are spacelike directions corresponding to gauge freedom in assigning the edge-lengths. We evaluate the signature numerically for the simplicial configuration spaces based on some simple triangulations of the three-sphere (S^3) and three-torus (T^3). For the surface of a four-simplex triangulation of S^3 we find one timelike direction and all the rest spacelike over all of the simplicial configuration space. For the triangulation of T^3 around flat space we find degeneracies in the simplicial supermetric as well as a few gauge modes corresponding to a positive eigenvalue. Moreover, we have determined that some of the negative eigenvalues are physical, i.e. the corresponding eigenvectors are not generators of diffeomorphisms. We compare our results with the known properties of continuum superspace.

Full work available at URL: https://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/9609028

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zbMATH Keywords

signature of the Lund-Regge metricsimplicial 3-geometriessimplicial supermetric

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Applications of differential geometry to physics (53Z05) Lattice gravity, Regge calculus and other discrete methods in general relativity and gravitational theory (83C27)

Cited In (5)

• Title not available (Why is that?)
• Simplicial minisuperspace. II. Some classical solutions on simple triangulations
• Discrete structures in gravity
• Realizability of the Lorentzian \((n, 1)\)-simplex
• Recent progress in Regge calculus

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