Foundational Structure of Local Amplitudes in Quantum Gravity

Abstract

There has been recently renewed interest in the quantisation of gravity by considering local subsystems on light-like hypersurfaces. The main purpose of this paper is to present a theory-independent perspective on these developments assuming only basic knowledge of quantum theory and general relativity. In addition, we present a top-down approach to constructing local amplitudes in causal diamonds. The fundamental building block is a slab of light-like geometry (e.g. a segment of a light cone embedded into spacetime). Each slab is a three-dimensional light-like hypersurface bounded by two cuts, its past and future corners. After briefly reviewing the timeless formalism of quantum theory, we equip each null slab a with a kinematical Hilbert space that factorizes into constituents associated to the three-dimensional interior and its two corners. Upon assuming the existence of vacuum states for the bulk and boundary symmetries and a fundamental projector onto physical states, we explain how to introduce local amplitudes by contracting boundary states according to the pattern of a causal diamond. Finally, we show that the resulting local transition amplitudes satisfy Ward identities and charge conservation for the underlying symmetries. The paper closes with a summary and discussion for how different approaches to quantum gravity can realise our proposal in practice.