THREE-DIMENSIONAL QUANTUM GRAVITY AS DYNAMICAL TRIANGULATION

Abstract

The dynamical triangulation model of 3-dimensional Quantum Gravity is defined and studied. We propose two different algorithms for numerical simulations, leading to consistent results. One is the 3-dimensional generalization of the bonds flip, another is more sophisticated algorithm, based on Schwinger–Dyson equations. We found such care necessary, because our results appear to be quite unexpected. We simulated up to 60000 tetrahedra and observed none of the feared pathologies like factorial growth of the partition function with volume, or collapse to the branched polymer phase. The volume of the Universe grows exponentially when the bare cosmological constant λ approaches the critical value λ c from above, but the closed Universe exists and has peculiar continuum limit. The Universe compressibility diverges as (λ − λ c )−2 and the bare Newton constant linearly approaches negative critical value as λ goes to λ c , provided the average curvature is kept at zero. The fractal properties turned out to be the same, as in two dimensions, namely the effective Hausdorff dimension grows logarithmically with the size of the test geodesic sphere.