Interacting Scalar Field Cosmology from Full Quantum Gravity

TL;DR

This paper explores how interacting group field theory models influence cosmological dynamics, revealing emergent dark energy, modified scalar field behavior, and the potential for scale-dependent gravity within quantum gravity frameworks.

Contribution

It introduces a perturbative approach to derive effective cosmological dynamics from GFT models with novel interaction classes and analyzes their impact on matter and geometric sectors.

Findings

Emergence of a cosmological constant in pseudotensorial models

Quantum gravity induces a scalar field mass term and modifies symmetries

Scale-dependent gravitational coupling can relax compatibility conditions

Abstract

We study the relational cosmological dynamics emerging from interacting group field theory (GFT) models minimally coupled to a massless clock scalar field and a self-interacting scalar field. We focus on two broad classes of GFT interactions - pseudosimplicial and pseudotensorial - which generalize simplicial and tensorial interactions, respectively. Treating these interactions perturbatively, we extract the effective cosmological dynamics using mean-field techniques. In the geometric sector, we identify appropriate classical limits of the resulting dynamics, characterized by the emergence of a cosmological constant term in pseudotensorial models and of dynamical dark energy in pseudosimplicial ones. In the matter sector, we find that quantum gravity interactions induce a mass term and modify the classical symmetries of the scalar field dynamics, allowing for a consistent classical matter-geometry description only for specific forms of the effective scalar field potential. Finally, we show that these quantum gravity compatibility conditions on the effective potentials can be relaxed by allowing for a scale-dependent gravitational coupling, and that this running is uniquely fixed once the classical scalar field potential is specified.