Effective Potential of the Conformal Factor: Gravitational Average Action and Dynamical Triangulations

Understand

We discuss the effective potential of the conformal factor in the effective average action approach to Quantum Einstein Gravity.

• Without invoking any truncation or other approximations we show that if the theory has has a non-Gaussian ultraviolet fixed point and is asymptotically safe the potential has a characteristic behavior near the origin.
• We argue that this characteristic behavior has already been observed in numerical simulations within the Causal Dynamical Triangulation approach.