From Principles to Effective Models: A Constructive Framework for Effective Covariant Actions with a Unique Vacuum Solution

TL;DR

This paper develops a constructive framework to derive covariant actions with a unique vacuum in quantum gravity models, addressing ambiguities and unifying black hole and cosmological descriptions.

Contribution

It introduces a method to formulate 4D covariant actions from physical degrees of freedom, ensuring a unique vacuum and resolving key ambiguities in quantum gravity models.

Findings

Constructs a covariant action belonging to generalized mimetic gravity.

Resolves the curvature polymerisation ambiguity in loop quantum cosmology.

Provides a basis for perturbation theory including quantum gravity effects.

Abstract

The absence of Birkhoff's theorem in effective quantum gravity models leads to a fundamental ambiguity in the vacuum sector, where a priori no unique vacuum solution exists. As a result, phenomenological investigations of the physical implications of these models have been made more difficult. We address this challenge by establishing a constructive framework which allows to formulate 4D covariant actions from the physical nature of the systems's degrees of freedom, which are dust and gravity, together with two guiding principles. We take advantage of the non-propagating nature of a relational dust clock and the suppression of gravitational waves in spherical symmetry. This structural ultralocality allows for a decomposition of the dynamics into independent LTB shells. We further impose spatial diffeomorphism invariance and a geometric guiding principle, where the latter ensures that a unique and static vacuum solution exists. These assumptions allow to strictly constrain the LTB shell Hamiltonian to a factorised form as well as the static vacuum metric function to a universal form. This constructive framework produces a fully 4D-covariant action that belongs to the class of generalised extended mimetic gravity models. This provides the necessary consistent basis for a perturbation theory in the context of quasi-normal modes or cosmological perturbations beyond the static sector in which quantum gravity effects are also included in linear and higher order perturbations. Furthermore, for this class of models our results resolve the long-standing `curvature polymerisation ambiguity' in loop quantum cosmology by unambiguously determining how flat space modifications are extended to non-flat geometries, thus unifying the description of black holes and cosmology in a single effective framework.