TWO-FORM GRAVITY AND THE GENERATION OF SPACE-TIME

Abstract

In the framework of the two-form gravity, which is classically equivalent to the Einstein gravity, the one-loop effective potential for the conformal factor of metric is calculated in the finite volume and in the finite temperature by choosing a temporal gauge condition. There appears a quartically divergent term which cannot be removed by the renormalization of the cosmological term and we find there is only one nontrivial minimum in the effective potential. If the cutoff scale has a physical meaning, e.g. the Planck scale coming from string theory, this minimum might explain why the space-time is generated, i.e. why the classical metric has a nontrivial value.