2025/09/30 by Angelinos, Nikolaos
#FOS: Physical sciences #High Energy Physics - Theory (hep-th)
paper · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2509.26052
We construct a model of 3D quantum gravity based on abelian topological quantum field theory (TQFT), by defining the gravitational path-integral as a sum over all 3D topologies with genus-g boundary Σg. The path-integral of an abelian TQFT \mathcal T on any single topology with boundary Σg prepares a stabilizer state. This way, \mathcal T partitions all these topologies into finitely many equivalence classes, where each topology within a class is associated with the same stabilizer state. The gravitational path-integral can thus be rephrased as a weighted sum over representative topologies, which are further organized into orbits under the mapping class group of Σg. One orbit is represented by handlebodies, whose average reproduces the ``Poincaré series of the vacuum", while additional orbits describe non-handlebody topologies. The resulting quantum gravity state is Sp(2g,\mathbb Z)-invariant and can be expressed as a weighted average of 2D CFT partition functions on Σg. This establishes a duality between a weighted sum over bulk topologies and a weighted sum over boundary CFTs. We introduce the ``λ-matrix", which relates bulk and boundary weights. The λ-matrix can be fully determined by the set of topological boundary conditions that the TQFT admits, and we present a systematic procedure to construct this set. Using this framework, we evaluate the λ-matrix and the TQFT gravity state in several tractable examples.