Einstein gravity as a symmetry-breaking effect in quantum field theory

Abstract

This article gives a pedagogical review of recent work in which the Einstein-Hilbert gravitational action is obtained as a symmetry-breaking effect in quantum field theory. Particular emphasis is placed on the case of renormalizable field theories with dynamical scale-invariance breaking, in which the induced gravitational effective action is finite and calculable. A functional integral formulation is used throughout, and a detailed analysis is given of the role of dimensional regularization in extracting finite answers from formally quadratically divergent integrals. Expressions are derived for the induced gravitational constant and for the induced cosmological constant in quantized matter theories on a background manifold, and a strategy is outlined for computing the induced constants in the case of an $\mathrm{SU}(n)$ gauge theory. By use of the background field method, the formalism is extended to the case in which the metric is also quantized, yielding a derivation of the semiclassical Einstein equations as an approximation to quantum gravity, as well as general formulas for the induced (or renormalized) gravitational and cosmological constants.