Seminars 2004-2005


Thursday, January 27th, 2005, 15:00, Aula Conversi, Roma 1


Unitarity in the presence of closed timelike curves. A dynamical chronology protection mechanism

L. Cornalba (Roma2)

Motivated by string theory arguments, we analyse quantum field theory in a specific space time with closed timelike curves. We conjecture and partly show that, for discrete values of the gravitational coupling constant, the resulting theory is unitary. These discrete values are obtained in two independent ways, using high energy scattering in quantum gravity and using string dualities to rephrase the quantization condition as quantization of charge of certain extended objects.