State Sums and Geometry

Details State Sums and Geometry State Sums and Geometry

2011-02-08

arxiv.org/abs/1102.1688v1

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astrophysics

General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology

PhD Thesis, 106 pages

Scientific paper

In this thesis I review the definition of topological quantum field theories through state sums on triangulated manifolds. I describe the construction of state sum invariants of 3-manifolds from a graphical calculus and show how to evaluate the invariants as boundary amplitudes. I review how to define such a graphical calculus through SU(2) representation theory. I then review various geometricity results for the representation theory of SU(2), Spin(4) and SL(2,C), and define coherent boundary manifolds for state sums based on these representations. I derive the asymptotic geometry of the SU(2) based Ponzano-Regge invariant in three dimensions, and the SU(2) based Ooguri models amplitude in four dimensions. As a corollary to the latter results I derive the asymptotic behaviour of various recently proposed spin foam models motivated from the Plebanski formulation of general relativity. Finally the asymptotic geometry of the SL(2,C) based model is derived.

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