One-loop renormalization of a gravity-scalar system

Abstract

Extending the renormalizability proposal of the physical sector of 4D Einstein gravity, we have recently proposed renormalizability of the 3D physical sector of gravity-matter systems. The main goal of the present work is to conduct systematic one-loop renormalization of a gravity-matter system by applying our foliation-based quantization scheme. In this work we explicitly carry out renormalization of a gravity-scalar system with a Higgs-type potential. With the fluctuation part of the scalar field gauged away, the system becomes renormalizable through a metric field redefinition. We use dimensional regularization throughout. One of the salient aspects of our analysis is how the graviton propagator acquires the"mass" term. One-loop calculations lead to renormalization of the cosmological and Newton's constants. We discuss other implications of our results as well: time-varying vacuum energy density and masses of the elementary particles as well as the potential relevance of Neumann boundary condition for black hole information.