Topology change with Morse functions: progress on the Borde-Sorkin conjecture

Fuente: arXiv
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Autor principal: García-Heveling, Leonardo
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2022
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author García-Heveling, Leonardo
author_facet García-Heveling, Leonardo
contents Topology change is considered to be a necessary feature of quantum gravity by some authors, and impossible by others. One of the main arguments against it is that spacetimes with changing spatial topology have bad causal properties. Borde and Sorkin proposed a way to avoid this dilemma by considering topology changing spacetimes constructed from Morse functions, where the metric is allowed to vanish at isolated points. They conjectured that these Morse spacetimes are causally continuous (hence quite well behaved), as long as the index of the Morse points is different from $1$ and $n-1$. In this paper, we prove a special case of this conjecture. We also argue, heuristically, that the original conjecture is actually false, and formulate a refined version of it.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2202_09833
institution arXiv
publishDate 2022
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Topology change with Morse functions: progress on the Borde-Sorkin conjecture
García-Heveling, Leonardo
General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology
High Energy Physics - Theory
Mathematical Physics
Differential Geometry
53C50 (Primary), 83C45 (Secondary)
Topology change is considered to be a necessary feature of quantum gravity by some authors, and impossible by others. One of the main arguments against it is that spacetimes with changing spatial topology have bad causal properties. Borde and Sorkin proposed a way to avoid this dilemma by considering topology changing spacetimes constructed from Morse functions, where the metric is allowed to vanish at isolated points. They conjectured that these Morse spacetimes are causally continuous (hence quite well behaved), as long as the index of the Morse points is different from $1$ and $n-1$. In this paper, we prove a special case of this conjecture. We also argue, heuristically, that the original conjecture is actually false, and formulate a refined version of it.
title Topology change with Morse functions: progress on the Borde-Sorkin conjecture
topic General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology
High Energy Physics - Theory
Mathematical Physics
Differential Geometry
53C50 (Primary), 83C45 (Secondary)
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2202.09833