Polymer quantization of the Einstein-Rosen wormhole throat

Understand

We present a polymer quantization of spherically symmetric Einstein gravity in which the polymerized variable is the area of the Einstein-Rosen wormhole throat.

• In the classical polymer theory, the singularity is replaced by a bounce at a radius that depends on the polymerization scale.
• In the polymer quantum theory, we show numerically that the area spectrum is evenly-spaced and in agreement with a Bohr-Sommerfeld semiclassical estimate, and this spectrum is not qualitatively sensitive to issues of factor ordering or boundary conditions except in the lowest few eigenvalues.
• In the limit of small polymerization scale we recover, within the numerical accuracy, the area spectrum obtained from a Schrodinger quantization of the wormhole throat dynamics.