Midisuperspace quantization: possibilities for fractional and emergent spacetime dimensions

Recently, motivated by certain loop quantum gravity inspired corrections, it was shown that for spherically symmetric midisuperspace models infinitely many second derivative theories of gravity exist (as revealed by the presence of three arbitrary functions in the corresponding Lagrangian/Hamiltonian) and not just those allowed by spherically symmetric general relativity. This freedom can be interpreted as the freedom to accommodate certain quantum gravity corrections in these models even in the absence of higher curvature terms (at a semi-classical level, at least). For a particular choice of the arbitrary functions it is shown that the new theories map to spherically symmetric general relativity in arbitrary number of (integer) dimensions thus explicitly demonstrating that when working with midisuperspace models, one loses the information about the dimensionality of the full spacetime. In addition, it is shown that these new theories can accommodate scenarios of fractional spacetime dimensions as well as those of emergent spacetime dimensions -- a possibility suggested by various approaches to quantum gravity.Comment: 10 page

Fermionic edge states and new physics

We investigate the properties of the Dirac operator on manifolds with boundaries in presence of the Atiyah-Patodi-Singer boundary condition. An exact counting of the number of edge states for boundaries with isometry of a sphere is given. We show that the problem with the above boundary condition can be mapped to one where the manifold is extended beyond the boundary and the boundary condition is replaced by a delta function potential of suitable strength. We also briefly highlight how the problem of the self-adjointness of the operators in the presence of moving boundaries can be simplified by suitable transformations which render the boundary fixed and modify the Hamiltonian and the boundary condition to reflect the effect of moving boundary.Comment: 24 pages, 3 figures. Title changed, additional material in the Introduction section, the Application section and in the Discussion section highlighting some recent work on singular potentials, several references added. Conclusions remain unchanged. Version matches the version to appear in PR