Würzburg 2018 – scientific programme

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GR: Fachverband Gravitation und Relativitätstheorie

GR 16: Quantum Gravity III

GR 16.4: Talk

Friday, March 23, 2018, 11:45–12:00, NW-Bau - HS3

Spectral Dimension in Quantum Gravity and p-branes — •Marco Knipfer — Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies, Frankfurt am Main — Institute for Theoretical Physics, Goethe University Frankfurt, Frankfurt am Main

At the Planck scale the Universe is expected to suffer from wild quantum fluctuations. The latter can turn a classical spacetime from a smooth manifold to a sort of fractal. Fractals can have dimensions that differ from the standard topological dimension. A possible definition of the dimension of a fractal is offered by the concept of spectral dimension. Such a dimension is a measure of the dimensionality by inspecting how a particle diffuses on the spacetime manifold. An interesting feature is that most theories of quantum gravity have a scale dependant spectral dimension which approaches two at the Planck scale. We give an overview of the spectral dimension in different theories of quantum gravity and models incorporating quantum gravity effects. We also give a calculation of the spectral dimension when the diffusive processes is described in terms of p-branes by employing the quenched mini-superspace bosonic p-brane propagator.