Quantum-only metrics in spherically symmetric gravity

Abstract

The Einstein action for the gravitational field has some properties which make of it, after quantization, a rare prototype of systems with quantum configurations that do not have a classical analogue. Assuming spherical symmetry in order to reduce the effective dimensionality, we have performed a Monte Carlo simulation of the path integral with transition probability $e^{-\beta |S|}$. Although this choice does not allow to reproduce the full dynamics, it does lead us to find a large ensemble of metric configurations having action $|S|\ll \hbar$ by several magnitude orders. These vacuum fluctuations are strong deformations of the flat space metric (for which $S=0$ exactly). They exhibit a periodic polarization in the scalar curvature $R$. In the simulation we fix a length scale $L$ and divide it into $N$ sub-intervals. The continuum limit is investigated by increasing $N$ up to $\sim 10^6$; the average squared action $\langle S^2 \rangle$ is found to scale as $1/N^2$ and thermalization of the algorithm occurs at a very low temperature (classical limit). This is in qualitative agreement with analytical results previously obtained for theories with stabilized conformal factor in the asymptotic safety scenario.