June 2019

We revisit the canonical framework for general relativity in its connection-vierbein formulation, recasting the Gauss law, the Bianchi identity and the space diffeomorphism bulk constraints as conservation laws for boundary surface charges, respectively electric, magnetic and momentum charges. Partitioning the space manifold into 3D regions glued together through their interfaces, we focus on a single domain and its punctured 2D boundary. The punctures carry a ladder of Kac-Moody edge modes, whose 0-modes represent the electric and momentum charges while the higher modes describe the stringy vibration modes of the 1D-boundary around each puncture. In particular, this allows to identify missing observables in the discretization scheme used in loop quantum gravity and leads to an enhanced theory upgrading spin networks to tube networks carrying Virasoro representations. In the limit where the tubes are contracted to 1D links and the string modes neglected, we do not just recover loop quantum gravity but obtain a more general structure: Poincar’e charge networks, which carry a representation of the 3D diffeomorphism boundary charges on top of the $mathrm{SU}(2)$ fluxes and gauge transformations.

In the Aharonov-Bohm (AB) effect, a superposed charge acquires a detectable phase by enclosing an infinite solenoid, in a region where the solenoid’s electric and magnetic fields are zero. Its generation seems therefore explainable only by the local action of gauge-dependent potentials, not of gauge-independent fields. This was recently challenged by Vaidman, who explained the phase by the solenoid’s current interacting with the electron’s field (at the solenoid). Still, his model has a residual non-locality: it does not explain how the phase, generated at the solenoid, is detectable on the charge. In this paper we solve this non-locality explicitly, by quantising the field. We show that the AB phase is mediated locally by the entanglement between the charge and the photons, like all electromagnetic phases. We also predict a gauge-invariant value for the phase difference at each point along the charge’s path. We propose a realistic experiment to measure this phase difference locally, by partial quantum state tomography on the charge, without closing the interference loop.