PoS - Proceedings of Science
Volume 406 - Corfu Summer Institute 2021 "School and Workshops on Elementary Particle Physics and Gravity" (CORFU2021) - Workshop on New Developments in Quantum Gravity and String Theory
Wavefunction of the universe: Diffeomeorphism invariance and field redefinitions
H. Partouche*, N. Toumbas and B. de Vaulchier
Full text: pdf
Published on: November 23, 2022
Abstract
We review some recent results concerning the Hartle-Hawking wavefunction of the universe. We focus on pure Einstein theory of gravity in the presence of a positive cosmological constant. We carefully implement the gauge-fixing procedure for the minisuperspace path integral, by identifying the single modulus and by using diffeomorphism-invariant measures for the ghosts and the scale factor. Field redefinitions of the scale factor yield different prescriptions for computing the no-boundary ground-state wavefunction. They give rise to an infinite set of ground-state wavefunctions, each satisfying a different Wheeler-DeWitt equation, at the semi-classical level. The differences in the form of the Wheeler-DeWitt equations can be traced to ordering ambiguities in constructing the Hamiltonian upon canonical quantization. However, the inner products of the corresponding Hilbert spaces turn out to be equivalent, at least semi-classically. Thus, the model yields universal quantum predictions.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.22323/1.406.0159
How to cite

Metadata are provided both in "article" format (very similar to INSPIRE) as this helps creating very compact bibliographies which can be beneficial to authors and readers, and in "proceeding" format which is more detailed and complete.

Open Access
Creative Commons LicenseCopyright owned by the author(s) under the term of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.