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SUMMARY:Keeping matter in the loop in de Sitter quantum gravity - Jackson 
 Fliss\, DAMTP
DTSTART:20230126T130000Z
DTEND:20230126T140000Z
UID:TALK196429@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:85816
DESCRIPTION:Three-dimensional gravity\, having no propagating degrees of f
 reedom\, shares many features with topological field theory.  Correspondin
 gly\, Chern-Simons (CS) theory provides an attractive framework for quanti
 zing 3d gravity\, at least around a fixed saddle-point.  But how do we des
 cribe matter in CS gravity while retaining its useful features?  In this t
 alk I will focus on the CS description of Euclidean de Sitter space about 
 its three-sphere saddle.  I will construct a gauge-invariant object corres
 ponding to the quantum-gravity corrected one-loop determinant of a scalar 
 field.  This object\, which we coin the "Wilson spool\," can be interprete
 d as a collection of Wilson loops winding arbitrarily many times around th
 e three-sphere.  Constructing and\, subsequently\, evaluating the spool wi
 ll require us to revisit starting assumptions about unitarity of the repre
 sentations appearing in the Wilson loops as well as the library of "exact 
 methods" available to CS theories on the three-sphere.  The result will be
  an object that reduces to the scalar one-loop determinant on a three-sphe
 re in the limit that Newton's constant vanishes yet can be evaluated at in
  any order in G_N perturbation theory.  Time (and attention) remaining\, I
  will either discuss potential further applications of the Wilson spool (e
 ither to spinning fields or to contexts outside of de Sitter) or ramble ab
 out my confusions regarding "edge modes" in this theory.
LOCATION:Potter Room\, DAMTP
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