Emergent Einstein-Cartan gravity from a spinor loop

Abstract

In Einstein-Cartan spinor gravity under the irreversible vierbein postulate, only the spinor among the first-order variables has a kinetic term of its own at tree level. Any nonzero background vierbein breaks the local-Lorentz (LL) symmetry spontaneously. Our previous work showed that the spinor loop generates the kinetic and mass terms of the LL gauge field, manifesting LL as a hidden local symmetry. Here we show that the spinor loop also generates the vierbein two-point function, while respecting the background gauge invariance and satisfying the Ward-Takahashi identities of the true gauge invariance, for both the general-coordinate and LL symmetries. The scheme-independent logarithmic divergence assembles the familiar induced-gravity ingredients: a cosmological constant, an Einstein-Hilbert and a Weyl-squared term for the metric sector, and a mass and a higher-derivative kinetic term for the totally antisymmetric torsion. In the vierbein sector, this torsion is carried by the derivative of the antisymmetric part of the linear vierbein fluctuation. This part is the would-be Nambu-Goldstone boson of the spontaneously broken LL symmetry, and its couplings in the minimally coupled action are all fixed by general-coordinate and LL gauge invariance. The five induced terms form a single effective action, manifestly invariant under both symmetries, completing the vierbein sector of the hidden-local-Lorentz emergent-gravity scenario.