Off-shell Partition Functions in 3d Gravity

TL;DR

This paper develops a geometric quantization approach to compute off-shell partition functions in 3d chiral gravity, including cases without classical solutions, and relates these to topological recursion and JT gravity.

Contribution

It introduces a novel method using geometric quantization and equivariant localization to compute off-shell partition functions in 3d gravity, extending to non-classical solutions and connecting to JT gravity.

Findings

Partition functions expressed as integrals over moduli space.

Localization reduces complex integrals to finite-dimensional ones.

Topological recursion computes fake partition functions for arbitrary Riemann surfaces.

Abstract

We explore three-dimensional gravity with negative cosmological constant via canonical quantization. We focus on chiral gravity which is related to a single copy of $\mathrm{PSL}(2,\mathbb{R})$ Chern-Simons theory and is simpler to treat in canonical quantization. Its phase space for an initial value surface $\Sigma$ is given by the appropriate moduli space of Riemann surfaces. We use geometric quantization to compute partition functions of chiral gravity on three-manifolds of the form $\Sigma \times \mathrm{S}^1$, where $\Sigma$ can have asymptotic boundaries. Most of these topologies do not admit a classical solution and are thus not amenable to a direct semiclassical path integral computation. We use an index theorem that expresses the partition function as an integral of characteristic classes over phase space. In the presence of $n$ asymptotic boundaries, we use techniques from equivariant cohomology to localize the integral to a finite-dimensional integral over $\overline{\mathcal{M}}_{g,n}$, which we evaluate in low genus cases. Higher genus partition functions quickly become complicated since they depend in an oscillatory way on Newton's constant. There is a precise sense in which one can isolate the non-oscillatory part which we call the fake partition function. We establish that there is a topological recursion that computes the fake partition functions for arbitrary Riemann surfaces $\Sigma$. There is a scaling limit in which the model reduces to JT gravity and our methods give a novel way to compute JT partition functions via equivariant localization.