Quantum graphity: A model of emergent locality

By T. Konopka, Fotini Markopoulou, Simone Severini. 2008

171 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Quantum graphity is a background-independent model for emergent macroscopic locality, spatial geometry and matter. The states of the system correspond to dynamical graphs on N vertices. At high energy, the graph describing the system is highly connected and the physics is invariant under the full symmetric group acting on the vertices. We present evidence that the model also has a low-energy phase in which the graph describing the system breaks permutation symmetry and appears to be ordered, low dimensional and local. Consideration of the free energy associated with the dominant terms in the dynamics shows that this low-energy state is thermodynamically stable under local perturbations. The model can also give rise to an emergent U(1) gauge theory in the ground state by the string-net condensation mechanism of Levin and Wen. We also reformulate the model in graph-theoretic terms and compare its dynamics to some common graph processes.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics, Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/00132f89484ba83ddaea8adce680d53b2fedd2f7

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In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

In Nuclear and High Energy Physics

In Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

Citations in the corpus

Renormalization of Tensorial Group Field Theories: Abelian U(1) Models in Four Dimensions (2012, background): “Continuum spacetime and geometry have been suggested [26,43, 44] to arise, in the TGFT context, through a phase transition (dubbed geometrogenesis, following [45,46]), as happens in matrix models.”
Random tensor models in the large N limit: Uncoloring the colored tensor models (2012, result): “com 1 This term has appeared for the first time in [4] which is however quite different from our approach.”