Gravitation in terms of observables: breathing new life into a bold proposal of Mandelstam

By Rodolfo Gambini and Jorge Pullin

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Rodolfo Gambini and Jorge Pullin have been collaborating for 27 years

In the 1960’s Stanley Mandelstam set out to reformulate gravity and gauge theories in terms of observable quantities. The quantities he chose are curves, but specified intrinsically. The simplest way of understanding what does “specified intrinsically” means is to think how the trajectory of a car is specified by a GPS unit. The unit will give commands “turn right”, “advance a certain amount”, “turn left”. In this context “right” and “left” are not with respect to an external coordinate system, but with respect to your car. The list of commands would remain the same whatever external coordinate system one chooses (in the case of a car it could be a road marked in kilometres or miles, for instance). The resulting theories are therefore automatically invariant under coordinate transformations (invariant under diffeomorphisms). They can therefore constitute a point of departure for the quantization of gravity radically different from other ones. For instance, they would share in common with loop quantum gravity that both are loop-based approaches. However, in loop quantum gravity one has to implement the symmetry of the theory under diffeomorphisms. Intrinsically defined loops, on the other hand, are space-time diffeomorphism invariant, therefore such a symmetry is already implemented. It is well known that in loop quantum gravity diffeomorphism invariance is key in selecting in almost unique way the inner product of the theory and therefore on determining the theory’s Hilbert space. Intrinsically defined loops are likely to be endowed with a very different inner product and Hilbert space structure. In fact, since the loops in the Mandelstam approach are space-time ones it lends itself naturally to an algebraic space-time covariant form of quantization.

What are the fundamental gauge symmetries of the gravitational field?

Uncovering the gauge symmetries of general relativity via Noether’s theorem.

By Merced Montesinos, Diego Gonzalez, and Mariano Celada 

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Symmetries are the cornerstone of modern physics. They are present in almost all its subfields and have become the language in which the underlying laws of the universe are expressed. Indeed, in the standard model of particle physics, our best understanding of nature down to the subatomic world, the interactions among fundamental particles are dictated by internal gauge symmetries.

Although the four fundamental interactions can be fitted within the framework of gauge theories, gravity still remains as the weird family member. While gravity can be conceived as a gauge theory on its own, it seems to be one that differs from those describing the non-gravitational interactions. Indeed, the latter are embedded within the so-called Yang-Mills theories, but gravity is something else.

Merced Montesinos (centre) is a theoretical physicist at Departamento de Física, Cinvestav, Mexico.
Diego Gonzalez (left) is a postdoctoral researcher at Instituto de Ciencias Nucleares, UNAM, Mexico.
Mariano Celada (right) is a postdoctoral researcher at Departamento de Física, UAM-I, Mexico.

Gravitational waves measure colour of black holes

By Enrico Barausse, Richard Pires Brito, Vitor Cardoso, Irina Dvorkin, and Paolo Pani

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Black holes predicted by Einstein are, well, black. In classical physics, nothing can escape their event horizon, not light, not matter, and neither gravitational waves.

There is a deep reason for this absolute blackness. If the event horizon were not a perfectly absorbing surface, but rather a partially reflective one, spinning black holes would become unstable and would shed most of their rotational energy into gravitational waves. This process is known as superradiant instability [1], and is tightly linked to the presence of an ergoregion, a region of spacetime just outside the event horizon, where modes of negative energy are allowed to exist. Negative energy-modes can form in the ergoregion of normal humdrum black holes, but are eventually doomed to fall in the event horizon.

Enrico Barausse

Richard Pires Brito

Professor Vitor Cardoso

Irina Dvorkin

Paolo Pani

If (what look like) black objects had a surface, such modes would be partially reflected by it, and they would bounce back and forth between the horizon and the boundary of the ergoregion (which they cannot cross, since negative energy modes cannot travel to infinity). Each time they reach the ergoregion boundary, they come out as positive energy-modes, thus inside the ergoregion they would keep growing in amplitude (i.e. their energy would keep decreasing and becoming more negative) eventually producing an instability. Indeed, these ‘bounces’ produce ‘echoes’ in the gravitational wave signal [2] from the remnant black hole forming from binary mergers, and there are claims [3] (albeit controversial [4]) that they may have been seen in the LIGO data.

In this paper we do not look at the black holes that form from binary mergers, but rather at isolated ones. These black holes can have a wide range of masses (from stellar masses for stellar-origin black holes up to millions or billions solar masses for supermassive black holes) and a variety of spins (on which we have some knowledge thanks to electromagnetic observations). Normally, isolated black holes do not emit gravitational waves, but if their event horizon had some reflectivity (that is, if these objects were not totally black), they would turn into black-hole bombs due to superradiance, and they would shed almost all their angular momentum in gravitational waves. These gravitational wave signals would be too weak to be detected singularly, but because there are in general many more black holes in isolation than in binaries, they can produce a very large stochastic background. Indeed, this background would be orders of magnitude larger than the current upper bounds from LIGO/Virgo. Similar results also apply to supermassive black holes, in the yet-unexplored LISA band.

So in conclusion, the existing stochastic background constraints from LIGO and Virgo show that black holes are very black, although some shades of grey may still be allowed. Indeed, while 100% reflection from the horizon is ruled out, smaller reflection coefficients may still be possible depending on the spin of the object [5].

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References:
[1] W. H. Press and S. A. Teukolsky, “Floating Orbits, Superradiant Scattering and the Black-hole Bomb“. Nature. 238 (5361): 211-212 (1972);
Brito, Cardoso, Pani; “Superradiance“, Springer (2015)
[2] Cardoso, Franzin, Pani, “Is the gravitational-wave ringdown a probe of the event horizon?“, Phys. Rev. Lett. 116, 171101 (2016)
[3] Abedi & Afshordi, “Echoes from the Abyss: Tentative evidence for Planck-scale structure at black hole horizons“, Phys. Rev. D 96, 082004 (2017)
[4] Ashton+ https://arxiv.org/abs/1612.05625; Abedi, Dykaar, Afshordi, https://arxiv.org/abs/1701.03485 and https://arxiv.org/abs/1803.08565;
Westerweck+, “Low significance of evidence for black hole echoes in gravitational wave data“, Phys. Rev. D 97, 124037 (2018)
[5] Maggio, Pani, Ferrari “Exotic Compact Objects and How to Quench their Ergoregion Instability“, Phys. Rev. D 96, 104047 (2017); Maggio, Cardoso, Dolan, Pani, http://arxiv.org/abs/arXiv:1807.08840

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Read the full article in Classical and Quantum Gravity:
The stochastic gravitational-wave background in the absence of horizons
Enrico Barausse et al 2018 Class. Quantum Grav. 35 20LT01

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Winner of the 2018 IOP Gravitational Physics Group (GPG) thesis prize: Dr Viraj A A Sanghai

Can you tell us a little bit about the work in your thesis?

One of the challenges of modern cosmology is to interpret observations in a consistent and model-independent way. There are several assumptions in interpreting cosmological/astrophysical data. For example, it is often assumed that Einstein’s theory of gravity is the correct theory of gravity. Furthermore, fundamental to cosmology is the assumption that the universe is homogeneous and isotropic on the largest scales and hence, this is the correct starting point to interpret cosmological data. To test these assumptions, approaches are needed, which work in a model-independent way. Broadly speaking, my thesis addresses these questions.

Thinking back, what was the most interesting thing that happened during your PhD?

Dr Viraj A A Sanghai is a postdoctoral fellow working on theoretical cosmology at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Canada

The most interesting thing that happened during my PhD was the discovery of gravitational waves by LIGO, due to the merging of two black holes. This opened up a new avenue into testing Einstein’s theory of gravity and started the new field of gravitational wave astronomy. Before this, all our astronomical observations relied on electromagnetic radiation. This discovery is helping us to have a deeper understanding of our Universe. Consequently, the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded for this discovery.

Soft hair and you

by Josh Kirklin

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Awaken, quantum relativist.

Have breakfast, and notice that a black hole has found its way into your laboratory. You measure its mass M, electric charge Q and angular momentum J, double-check the statement of the no hair theorem, and tell yourself that you can learn no more about this particular black hole.

But the quantum mechanic inside of you objects. As a devout believer in unitarity, you are convinced that the black hole must contain a complete description of the matter involved in its formation. So, you think, the no hair theorem must not apply. Finding no logical inconsistency in the mathematical steps involved in its proof, you decide that something must be wrong with its initial assumptions.

One such assumption is that two black holes related by a gauge transformation are physically equivalent. But this cannot be correct, since if we do a gauge transformation whose action does not vanish sufficiently quickly at infinity, there are observable consequences. The quickest way to become convinced of this fact is to find the Poisson brackets appropriate for a description of gravity and electromagnetism, and to use them to compute the actions generated by M, Q and J. The action of each is a gauge transformation that is non-trivial at infinity, and it is a basic fact of Hamiltonian mechanics that if a quantity is observable (M, Q and J certainly are), then so too must be the action that it generates.

About the author: Josh Kirklin is a PhD student in the Relativity and Gravitation group at the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics of the University of Cambridge. He studies black hole thermodynamics and the role of information in quantum gravity.

You deduce that you have at least three new gauge-dependent observable parameters (one for each of M, Q and J) to describe your black hole. In fact, you have infinitely many more, since the dipole, quadrupole and higher order moments of M, Q and J also generate gauge transformations that are non-trivial at infinity. The no hair theorem guarantees that the higher order moments of M, Q and J themselves must vanish, but it does not claim the same for the resultant new gauge-dependent variables.

So you conclude that your stationary black hole is actually described by infinitely many degrees of freedom. These are known as soft hairs, and the quantities which generate their transformations are known as soft charges.

During lunch, you manage to devise a clever experiment which makes use of the gravitational and electromagnetic memory effects to measure the soft hairdo of your black hole. Partially out of respect for the event horizon, but mostly out of fear, you decide to stay far enough away from the black hole that you must treat yourself as an idealised observer at infinity in your calculations. So, carrying out your experiment, you obtain a set of numbers describing how the soft hair appears to an observer at infinity.

But the black hole is an isolated body in spacetime, whose properties should be intrinisic to it. What you really desire is a description of the soft hair that is local to the black hole – one that would reflect what a more courageous observer, who was more willing to closely approach the event horizon, might see. You wonder what the best way would be to deduce such a local description from your observations at infinity, and, absent-mindedly leafing through the latest issue of CQG, you stumble upon a paper that takes you part of the way towards the answer. Following its advice, you are able to write the soft charges in terms of fields close to the black hole.

At dinner, you decide that you would like to justify your scientific credentials by predicting the future of the black hole. Before the discovery of soft hair, you would have only been able to treat the black hole as a single thermodynamical system, supporting an entropy and emitting Hawking radiation. This was necessary because you only had a macroscopic description for your black hole, being ignorant of its microscopic physics. But now you feel that you can improve on this, since you have a candidate for the black hole’s microscopic degrees of freedom – its soft hair. To make some predictions, all you need is a theory that governs the dynamics of the soft hair, and that same paper seems to again provide some assistance. It argues that a softly hairy black hole should actually be treated as an infinity of thermodynamic systems, all in thermal contact with each other. This thermal contact manifests as a heat current on the event horizon.

You use these results to make your predictions, and climb into bed after an exhausting day of hands-on relativity. Drifting off to sleep, you wonder whether the discovery of soft hair will be enough to solve one of the biggest mysteries of black hole physics – the information paradox. To have any hope of this being the case, you ought to be able to use the existence of soft hair to derive the black hole area entropy relation. You have heard rumors that this result is close at hand, and that the paper announcing it will bear Stephen Hawking’s name (making it his last published work).

Until then, you can only dream of tomorrow’s meals and measurements…

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Read the full article in Classical and Quantum Gravity:                                                     Localisation of soft charges, and thermodynamics of softly hairy black holes
Josh Kirklin, 2018 Class. Quantum Grav. 35 175010

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Understanding exact space-times

By Jiří Podolský 

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General relativity is a unique gem, Einstein’s most brilliant idea, and his greatest gift to humankind. Conceived in 1915, it still remains the best theory of gravity. I’m sure Einstein himself would be surprised how remarkably well it describes reality, even in the most violent and dynamical situations. Just recall its recent spectacular vindication by the first direct detection of gravitational waves from binary black hole mergers at cosmological distances. What an achievement! Gravitational waves, black holes, cosmology – all three main ingredients and predictions of Einstein’s theory combined together.

Exact space-times

As we all know, Einstein’s equations determine the space-time geometry, which is the gravitational field. And we must take all their predictions seriously. Exact solutions to Einstein’s field equations include the mathematical truth about the physical reality. Unfortunately, it is often obscured, usually very deeply hidden. To dig out the physically measurable invariant quantities and consequences, is a painful mining process involving various techniques and methods. It is the real art of science.

It is essential to be well-equipped for the investigation of exact space-times. Nevertheless, here we are preparing to descend old silver mines in Kutná Hora, the source of great wealth of the Kingdom of Bohemia in the Middle Ages. (Jerry Griffiths and Jiří Podolský, April 2006)

Putting a limit on the mass of the graviton

by Clifford Will

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Clifford Will (http://www.phys.ufl.edu/~cmw/) is Distinguished Professor of Physics at the University of Florida and Chercheur Associé at the Institut d’Astrophysique de Paris. Until the end of 2018, he is Editor-in-Chief of CQG.

According to general relativity, the gravitational interaction is propagated as if the field were massless, just as in electrodynamics.   Thus the speed of gravitational waves is precisely the same as the speed of light, a fact spectacularly confirmed when gravitational waves and gamma rays from the binary neutron star merger event GW170817 arrived within 1.74 seconds of each other, even after traveling for 120 million years.

But some modified gravity theories propose that the field could be massive, so that gravitational waves might propagate more slowly than light, and with a speed that depends on wavelength.   The shorthand term for this is a “massive graviton”, although quantum gravity plays no role in this discussion.  This is entirely a classical phenomenon.

If space-time has defects, how could we find out?

By Sabine Hossenfelder

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Whether space and time come in discrete chunks is one of the central questions of quantum gravity, the still missing unification of quantum theory with gravity. Discretization is a powerful method to tame infinities exactly like the ones that appear when we try to quantize gravity. It is thus not surprising that many approaches to quantum gravity rely on some discrete structure, may that be condensed matter analogies, triangulations, or approaches based on networks.

Sabine Hossenfelder

Many researchers in the field hope that besides taming the infinities that appear in the quantization of gravity, discretization will also prevent the formation of singularities that general relativity predicts, for example at the big bang and inside black holes.  If space-time was fundamentally made of finite-sized chunks, then the singularities would merely be mathematical artefacts, just like singularities in hydrodynamics are merely mathematical artefacts of using the fluid-approximation on distances when we should instead use atomic physics.

Finding order in a sea of chaos

By Alejandro Cárdenas-Avendaño, Andrés F. Gutiérrez, Leonardo A. Pachón, and Nicolás Yunes

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Hunting for constants of the motion in dynamical systems is hard. How can one find a combination of dynamical variables that remains unchanged during a complicated evolution? While it is true that answering this question is not trivial, symmetries can sometimes come to the rescue. The motion of test particles around a spinning (Kerr) black hole, for example, has a conserved mass, energy and angular momentum. Nevertheless, simple symmetries can only go so far. Given the complexity of the radial and polar sector of Kerr geodesics, it came as a complete surprise when Carter found, in 1968, a fourth constant of the motion, which was later found to be associated with the existence of a Killing tensor by Walker and Penrose. This fourth constant then allowed the complete separability of the geodesic equations, thus proving the integrability of the system, and as a consequence, that the motion of a test particle around a Kerr black hole is not chaotic in General Relativity (GR).

 

● Alejandro Cárdenas-Avendaño is a graduate student at Montana State University and holds a junior researcher position at Fundación Universitaria Konrad Lorenz.

● Andrés F. Gutierrez is a graduate student at Universidad de Antioquia.

● Leonardo A. Pachón is an associate professor at Universidad de Antioquia.

● Nicolás Yunes is an associate professor at Montana State University, and co-founder of the eXtreme Gravity Institute.

Holography inside out: from 3D gravity to 2D statistical models

By Bianca Dittrich, Christophe Goeller, Etera R. Livine, and Aldo Riello

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Despite many years of research, quantum gravity remains a challenge. One of the reasons is that the many tools developed for perturbative quantum field theory are, in general, not applicable to quantum gravity. On the other hand, non-perturbative approaches have a difficult time in finding and extracting computable observables. The foremost problem here is a lack of diffeomorphism-invariant observables.

Aldo Riello ) is a senior postdoctoral fellow at Perimeter Institute.

Christophe Goeller is a PhD student at ENS Lyon and Perimeter Institute.

Etera Livine is a senior researcher at ENS Lyon.

Bianca Dittrich is a senior faculty at Perimeter Institute. Together they are the ABCE team, still looking for the right D to go deeper into holographic Duals.

The situation can be improved very much by considering space-time regions with boundaries. This is also physically motivated, since one would like to be able to describe the physics of a given bounded region in a quasi-local way, that is without requiring a detailed description of the rest of the space-time outside. The key point is that the boundary can be used as an anchor, allowing to define observables in relation to this boundary. Then we can consider different boundary conditions, which translates at the quantum level into a rich zoo of boundary wave-functions. These boundary states can correspond to semi-classical boundary geometries or superpositions of those. The states can also describe asymptotic flat boundaries, thus allowing us to compare with perturbative approaches. In this context, holography in quantum gravity aims to determine how much of the bulk geometry can be reconstructed from the data encoded in the boundary state.

The boundary wave function Ψ are described by  dual theories defined on the boundary of the solid torus. These 2D boundary theories, obtained by integrating over all the bulk degrees of freedom of the geometry, encode the full 3D quantum gravity partition function.