Quantum Loops in Non-Local Gravity

We review an approach developed in the last few years by our group in which GR is modified in the infrared, at an effective level, by nonlocal terms associated to a mass scale. We begin by recalling the notion of quantum effective action and its associated nonlocalities, illustrating some of their features with the anomaly-induced effective actions in $D=2$ and $D=4$. We examine conceptual issues of nonlocal theories such as causality, degrees of freedoms and ghosts, stressin...

This chapter of the Handbook of Quantum Gravity aims to illustrate how nonlocality can be implemented in field theories, as well as the manner it solves fundamental difficulties of gravitational theories. We review Stelle's quadratic gravity, which achieves multiplicative renormalizability successfully to remove quantum divergences by modifying the Einstein's action but at the price of breaking the unitarity of the theory and introducing Ostrogradski's ghosts. Utilizing nonlo...

We propose a nonlocal field theory for gravity in presence of matter consistent with perturbative unitarity, quantum finiteness, and other essential classical properties that we are going to list below. First, the theory exactly reproduces the same tree-level scattering amplitudes of Einstein's gravity coupled to matter insuring no violation of macro-causality. Second, all the exact solutions of the Einstein's theory are also exact solutions of the nonlocal theory. Finally, a...

In this talk, we give a glimpse of the problems with quantum gravity and some possible solutions.

I describe the treatment of gravity as a quantum effective field theory. This allows a natural separation of the (known) low energy quantum effects from the (unknown) high energy contributions. Within this framework, gravity is a well behaved quantum field theory at ordinary energies. In studying the class of quantum corrections at low energy, the dominant effects at large distance can be isolated, as these are due to the propagation of the massless particles (including gravi...

In this paper a nonlocal generalization of field quantization is suggested. This quantization principle presupposes the assumption that the commutator between a field operator an the operator of the canonical conjugated variable referring to other space-time points does not vanish as it is postulated in the usual setting of quantum field theory. Based on this presupposition the corresponding expressions for the field operators, the eigenstates and the path integral formula ar...

Although General Relativity predicts the presence of a singularity inside of a Black Hole, it is not a complete theory of gravity. A real structure of a Black Hole interior near an expected singularity depends on the UV completion of gravity. In this paper, we establish that the question whether singular spherically symmetric solutions are absent is governed by the functional form of a non-perturbative graviton propagator. We explicitly show in a framework of a ghost-free inf...

A calculation of the one loop gravitational self-energy graph in non-anticommutative quantum gravity reveals that graviton loops are damped by internal momentum dependent factors in the modified propagator and the vertex functions. The non-anticommutative quantum gravity perturbation theory is finite for matter-free gravity and for matter interactions.

I attempt to answer the question of the title by giving an annotated list of the major results achieved, over the last six years, in the program to construct quantum general relativity using the Ashtekar variables and the loop representation. A summary of the key open problems is also included. Also included are expositions of several new results including the construction of spatially diffeomorphism invariant observables constructed by coupling general relativity to matter f...

In this paper we propose a wider class of symmetries including the Galilean shift symmetry as a subclass. We will show how to construct ghost-free nonlocal actions, consisting of infinite derivative operators, which are invariant under such symmetries, but whose functional form is not simply given by exponentials of entire functions. Motivated by this, we will consider the case of a scalar field and discuss the pole structure of the propagator which has infinitely many comple...