A Note On Complex Spacetime Metrics

By E. Witten. 2021

135 citations recorded by the source corpus.

For various reasons, it seems necessary to include complex saddle points in the"Euclidean"path integral of General Relativity. But some sort of restriction on the allowed complex saddle points is needed to avoid various unphysical examples. In this article, a speculative proposal is made concerning a possible restriction on the allowed saddle points in the gravitational path integral. The proposal is motivated by recent work of Kontsevich and Segal on complex metrics in quantum field theory, and earlier work of Louko and Sorkin on topology change from a real time point of view.

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1700ab142c01a2dde3341d48121a32d2d295d6ad

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

1. V. Gorbenko
2. Yiming Chen
3. J. Maldacena
4. D. Stanford
5. D. Harlow
6. Phil Saad
7. Thomas Hartman
8. S. Shenker

Citations in the corpus

• Bra-ket wormholes in gravitationally prepared states (2020, methodology): “The allowability criterion originates from demanding the convergence of the path integral of a p-form gauge field, for any p, see [55,56] for more details on the derivation.”