Bibcode
Baez, John C.; Perez, Alejandro
Referencia bibliográfica
eprint arXiv:gr-qc/0605087
Advertised on:
5
2006
Número de citas
16
Número de citas referidas
14
Descripción
BF theory is a topological theory that can be seen as a natural
generalization of 3-dimensional gravity to arbitrary dimensions. Here we
show that the coupling to point particles that is natural in three
dimensions generalizes in a direct way to BF theory in d dimensions
coupled to (d-3)-branes. In the resulting model, the connection is flat
except along the membrane world-sheet, where it has a conical
singularity whose strength is proportional to the membrane tension. As a
step towards canonically quantizing these models, we show that a basis
of kinematical states is given by `membrane spin networks', which are
spin networks equipped with extra data where their edges end on a brane.