We show that the canonical formulation of a generic action for 1+1-dimensional models of gravity coupled to matter admits a description in terms of Ashtekar-type variables. This includes the CGHS model and spherically symmetric reductions... more
We show that the canonical formulation of a generic action for 1+1-dimensional models of gravity coupled to matter admits a description in terms of Ashtekar-type variables. This includes the CGHS model and spherically symmetric reductions of 3+1 gravity as particular cases. This opens the possibility of discussing models of black hole evaporation using loop representation techniques and verifying which paradigm emerges for the possible elimination of the black hole singularity and the issue of information loss.
We recently studied gravity coupled to a scalar field in spherical symmetry using loop quantum gravity techniques. Since there are local degrees of freedom one faces the “problem of dynamics”. We attack it using the “uniform... more
We recently studied gravity coupled to a scalar field in spherical symmetry using loop quantum gravity techniques. Since there are local degrees of freedom one faces the “problem of dynamics”. We attack it using the “uniform discretization technique”. We find the quantum state that minimizes the value of the master constraint for the case of weak fields and curvatures. The state has the form of a direct product of Gaussians for the gravitational variables times a modified Fock state for the scalar field. In this paper we do three things. First, we verify that the previous state also yields a small value of the master constraint when one polymerizes the scalar field in addition to the gravitational variables. We then study the propagators for the polymerized scalar field in flat space-time using the previously considered ground state in the low energy limit. We discuss the issue of the Lorentz invariance of the whole approach. We note that if one uses real clocks to describe the system, Lorentz invariance violations are small. We discuss the implications of these results in the light of Hořava’s Gravity at the Lifshitz point and of the argument about potential large Lorentz violations in interacting field theories of Collins et al.
