Quantum gravity and path integrals

Abstract

The path-integral method seems to be the most suitable for the quantization of gravity. One would expect the dominant contribution to the path integral to come from metrics which are near background metrics that are solutions of classical Einstein equations. The action of these background metrics gives rise to a new phenomenon in field theory, intrinsic quantum entropy. This is shown to be related to the scaling behavior of the gravitational action and to the topology of the gravitational field. The quadratic terms in the Taylor series of the action about the background metrics give the one-loop corrections. In a supersymmetric theory the quartic and quadratic but not the so-called logarithmic divergences cancel to give a one-loop term that is finite without regularization. From the one-loop term one can obtain the effective energy-momentum tensor on the background metric. In the case of an evaporating black hole, the energy-momentum tensor will be regular on the future horizon. The usual perturbation expansion breaks down for quantum gravity because the higher (interaction) terms in the Taylor series are not bounded by the quadratic (free) ones. To overcome this I suggest that one might replace the path integrals over the terms in the Taylor series by a discrete sum of the exponentials of the actions of all complex solutions of the Einstein equations, each solution being weighted by its one-loop term. This approach seems to give a picture of the gravitational vacuum as a sea of virtual Planck-mass black holes.