Mathematicians Prove 2D Version of Quantum Gravity Really Works
Olena Shmahalo/Quanta Magazine
Alexander Polyakov, a theoretical physicist now at Princeton University, caught a glimpse of the future of quantum theory in 1981. A range of mysteries, from the wiggling of strings to the binding of quarks into protons, demanded a new mathematical tool whose silhouette he could just make out.
“There are methods and formulae in science which serve as master keys to many apparently different problems,” he wrote in the introduction to a now famous four-page letter in Physics Letters B. “At the present time we have to develop an art of handling sums over random surfaces.”
Polyakov’s proposal proved powerful. In his paper he sketched out a formula that roughly described how to calculate averages of a wildly chaotic type of surface, the “Liouville field.” His work brought physicists into a new mathematical arena, one essential for unlocking the behavior of theoretical objects called strings and building a simplified model of quantum gravity.
Years of toil would lead Polyakov to breakthrough solutions for other theories in physics, but he never fully understood the mathematics behind the Liouville field.
Over the last seven years, however, a group of mathematicians has done what many researchers thought impossible. In a trilogy of landmark publications, they have recast Polyakov’s formula using fully rigorous mathematical language and proved that the Liouville field flawlessly models the phenomena Polyakov thought it would.
“It took us 40 years in math to make sense of four pages,” said Vincent Vargas, a mathematician at the French National Center for Scientific Research and co-author of the research with Rémi Rhodes of Aix-Marseille University, Antti Kupiainen of the University of Helsinki, François David of the French National Center for Scientific Research, and Colin Guillarmou of Paris-Saclay University.
The three papers forge a bridge between the pristine world of mathematics and the messy reality of physics — and they do so by breaking new ground in the mathematical field of probability theory. The work also touches on philosophical questions regarding the objects that take center stage in the leading theories of fundamental physics: quantum fields.
“This is a masterpiece in mathematical physics,” said Xin Sun, a mathematician at the University of Pennsylvania.
Infinite Fields
In physics today, the main actors in the most successful theories are fields — objects that fill space, taking on different values from place to place.
In classical physics, for example, a single field tells you everything about how a force pushes objects around. Take Earth’s magnetic field: The twitches of a compass needle reveal the field’s influence (its strength and direction) at every point on the planet.
Fields are central to quantum physics, too. However, the situation here is more complicated due to the deep randomness of quantum theory. From the quantum perspective, Earth doesn’t generate one magnetic field, but rather an infinite number of different ones. Some look almost like the field we observe in classical physics, but others are wildly different.
But physicists still want to make predictions — predictions that ideally match, in this case, what a mountaineer reads on a compass. Assimilating the infinite forms of a quantum field into a single prediction is the formidable task of a “quantum field theory,” or QFT. This is a model of how one or more quantum fields, each with their infinite variations, act and interact.
Driven by immense experimental support, QFTs have become the basic language of particle physics. The Standard Model is one such QFT, depicting fundamental particles like electrons as fuzzy bumps that emerge from an infinitude of electron fields. It has passed every experimental test to date (although various groups may be on the verge of finding the first holes).
Physicists play with many different QFTs. Some, like the Standard Model, aspire to model real particles moving through the four dimensions of our universe (three spatial dimensions plus one dimension of time). Others describe exotic particles in strange universes, from two-dimensional flatlands to six-dimensional uber-worlds. Their connection to reality is remote, but physicists study them in the hopes of gaining insights they can carry back into our own world.
Polyakov’s Liouville field theory is one such example.
Gravity’s Field
The Liouville field, which is based on an equation from complex analysis developed in the 1800s by the French mathematician Joseph Liouville, describes a completely random two-dimensional surface — that is, a surface, like Earth’s crust, but one in which the height of every point is chosen randomly. Such a planet would erupt with mountain ranges of infinitely tall peaks, each assigned by rolling a die with infinite faces.
Such an object might not seem like an informative model for physics, but randomness is not devoid of patterns. The bell curve, for example, tells you how likely you are to randomly pass a seven-foot basketball player on the street. Similarly, bulbous clouds and crinkly coastlines follow random patterns, but it’s nevertheless possible to discern consistent relationships between their large-scale and small-scale features.
Liouville theory can be used to identify patterns in the endless landscape of all possible random, jagged surfaces. Polyakov realized this chaotic topography was essential for modeling strings, which trace out surfaces as they move. The theory has also been applied to describe quantum gravity in a two-dimensional world. Einstein defined gravity as space-time’s curvature, but translating his description into the language of quantum field theory creates an infinite number of space-times — much as the Earth produces an infinite collection of magnetic fields. Liouville theory packages all those surfaces together into one object. It gives physicists the tools to measure the curvature —and hence, gravitation — at every location on a random 2D surface.
“Quantum gravity basically means random geometry, because quantum means random and gravity means geometry,” said Sun.
Polyakov’s first step in exploring the world of random surfaces was to write down an expression defining the odds of finding a particular spiky planet, much as the bell curve defines the odds of meeting someone of a particular height. But his formula did not lead to useful numerical predictions.
To solve a quantum field theory is to be able to use the field to predict observations. In practice, this means calculating a field’s “correlation functions,” which capture the field’s behavior by describing the extent to which a measurement of the field at one point relates, or correlates, to a measurement at another point. Calculating correlation functions in the photon field, for instance, can give you the textbook laws of quantum electromagnetism.
Polyakov was after something more abstract: the essence of random surfaces, similar to the statistical relationships that make a cloud a cloud or a coastline a coastline. He needed the correlations between the haphazard heights of the Liouville field. Over the decades he tried two different ways of calculating them. He started with a technique called the Feynman path integral and ended up developing a workaround known as the bootstrap. Both methods came up short in different ways, until the mathematicians behind the new work united them in a more precise formulation.
Add ’Em Up
You might imagine that accounting for the infinitely many forms a quantum field can take is next to impossible. And you would be right. In the 1940s Richard Feynman, a quantum physics pioneer, developed one prescription for dealing with this bewildering situation, but the method proved severely limited.
Take, again, Earth’s magnetic field. Your goal is to use quantum field theory to predict what you’ll observe when you take a compass reading at a particular location. To do this, Feynman proposed summing all the field’s forms together. He argued that your reading will represent some average of all the field’s possible forms. The procedure for adding up these infinite field configurations with the proper weighting is known as the Feynman path integral.
It’s an elegant idea that yields concrete answers only for select quantum fields. No known mathematical procedure can meaningfully average an infinite number of objects covering an infinite expanse of space in general. The path integral is more of a physics philosophy than an exact mathematical recipe. Mathematicians question its very existence as a valid operation and are bothered by the way physicists rely on it.
“I’m disturbed as a mathematician by something which is not defined,” said Eveliina Peltola, a mathematician at the University of Bonn in Germany.
Physicists can harness Feynman’s path integral to calculate exact correlation functions for only the most boring of fields — free fields, which do not interact with other fields or even with themselves. Otherwise, they have to fudge it, pretending the fields are free and adding in mild interactions, or “perturbations.” This procedure, known as perturbation theory, gets them correlation functions for most of the fields in the Standard Model, because nature’s forces happen to be quite feeble.
But it didn’t work for Polyakov. Although he initially speculated that the Liouville field might be amenable to the standard hack of adding mild perturbations, he found that it interacted with itself too strongly. Compared to a free field, the Liouville field seemed mathematically inscrutable, and its correlation functions appeared unattainable.
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