Spectral dimensions and dimension spectra of quantum spacetimes

TL;DR

This paper explores the relationship between spectral dimension and dimension spectrum in quantum spacetimes, revealing how the latter helps understand the UV behavior and illustrating findings with quantum sphere and -k Minkowski models.

Contribution

It demonstrates the complementarity of spectral dimension and dimension spectrum in quantum gravity and analyzes their behavior in specific quantum spacetime examples.

Findings

Spectral dimensions of quantum sphere show log-periodic oscillations with decaying amplitude.

No oscillations are observed in the spectral dimensions of -k Minkowski spacetime.

The dimension spectrum effectively reveals UV properties of quantum spacetimes.

Abstract

Different approaches to quantum gravity generally predict that the dimension of spacetime at the fundamental level is not 4. The principal tool to measure how the dimension changes between the IR and UV scales of the theory is the spectral dimension. On the other hand, the noncommutative-geometric perspective suggests that quantum spacetimes ought to be characterised by a discrete complex set -- the dimension spectrum. Here we show that these two notions complement each other and the dimension spectrum is very useful in unravelling the UV behaviour of the spectral dimension. We perform an extended analysis highlighting the trouble spots and illustrate the general results with two concrete examples: the quantum sphere and the $\kappa$-Minkowski spacetime, for a few different Laplacians. In particular, we find out that the spectral dimensions of the former exhibit log-periodic oscillations, the amplitude of which decays rapidly as the deformation parameter tends to the classical value. In contrast, no such oscillations occur for either of the three considered Laplacians on the $\kappa$-Minkowski spacetime.