Background independent duals of the harmonic oscillator

Abstract

We show that a class of topological field theories are quantum duals of the harmonic oscillator. This is demonstrated by establishing a correspondence between the creation and annihilation operators and non-local gauge invariant observables of the topological field theory. The example is used to discuss some issues concerning background independence and the relation of vacuum energy to the problem of time in quantum gravity.

4 pages, version to appear in PRL

References in corpus (2)

• Ponzano-Regge model revisited III: Feynman diagrams and Effective field theory
• Graviton propagator from background-independent quantum gravity

Cited by in corpus (2)

• A quantum reduction to Bianchi I models in loop quantum gravity
• Solvable model for quantum gravity