Three dimensional lattice gravity as supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory

Abstract

We argue that a certain twisted supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory in three dimensions with gauge group SU(2) possesses a set of topological observables whose expectation values can be computed in a related Chern Simons theory. This Chern Simons theory has been proposed as a definition of three dimensional Euclidean quantum gravity. Since the YM theory admits a discretization which preserves the values of topological observables we conjecture that it can be used as a non-perturbative definition of the quantum gravity theory.