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Towards spectral geometry for causal sets. (English) Zbl 1369.83032

Summary: We show that the Feynman propagator (or the d’Alembertian) of a causal set contains the complete information about the causal set. Intuitively, this is because the Feynman propagator, being a correlator that decays with distance, provides a measure for the invariant distance between pairs of events. Further, we show that even the spectra alone (of the self-adjoint and anti-self-adjoint parts) of the propagator(s) and d’Alembertian already carry large amounts of geometric information about their causal set. This geometric information is basis independent and also gauge invariant in the sense that it is the relabeling invariant (which is analogous to diffeomorphism invariance). We provide numerical evidence that the associated spectral distance between causal sets can serve as a measure for the geometric similarity between causal sets.

MSC:

83C45 Quantization of the gravitational field
81T20 Quantum field theory on curved space or space-time backgrounds
81T18 Feynman diagrams
35P05 General topics in linear spectral theory for PDEs