One force to rule them all: asymptotic safety of gravity with matter

TL;DR

This paper investigates the asymptotic safety of quantum gravity with matter, showing gravitons dominate high-energy behavior and that gauge couplings become asymptotically free, with weak dependence on matter content.

Contribution

It provides systematic calculations of beta functions and fixed points for gravity coupled to matter, demonstrating the dominance of gravitons and the asymptotic safety of gravity.

Findings

Gauge coupling becomes asymptotically free

Gravity sector becomes asymptotically safe

Weak dependence on matter field multiplicities

Abstract

We study the asymptotic safety conjecture for quantum gravity in the presence of matter fields. A general line of reasoning is put forward explaining why gravitons dominate the high-energy behaviour, largely independently of the matter fields as long as these remain sufficiently weakly coupled. Our considerations are put to work for gravity coupled to Yang-Mills theories with the help of the functional renormalisation group. In an expansion about flat backgrounds, explicit results for beta functions, fixed points, universal exponents, and scaling solutions are given in systematic approximations exploiting running propagators, vertices, and background couplings. Invariably, we find that the gauge coupling becomes asymptotically free while the gravitational sector becomes asymptotically safe. The dependence on matter field multiplicities is weak. We also explain how the scheme dependence, which is more pronounced, can be handled without changing the physics. Our findings offer a new interpretation of many earlier results, which is explained in detail. The results generalise to theories with minimally coupled scalar and fermionic matter. Some implications for the ultraviolet closure of the Standard Model or its extensions are given.