A functional renormalization group equation for foliated spacetimes

Abstract

We derive an exact functional renormalization group equation for the projectable version of Ho\v{r}ava-Lifshitz gravity. The flow equation encodes the gravitational degrees of freedom in terms of the lapse function, shift vector and spatial metric and is manifestly invariant under background foliation-preserving diffeomorphisms. Its relation to similar flow equations for gravity in the metric formalism is discussed in detail, and we argue that the space of action functionals, invariant under the full diffeomorphism group, forms a subspace of the latter invariant under renormalization group transformations. As a first application we study the RG flow of the Newton constant and the cosmological constant in the ADM formalism. In particular we show that the non-Gaussian fixed point found in the metric formulation is qualitatively unaffected by the change of variables and persists also for Lorentzian signature metrics.