Superconformal gravity in Hamiltonian form: Another approach to the renormalization of gravitation

Abstract

We reexpress superconformal gravity in Hamiltonian form, explicitly displaying all 24 generators of the group as Dirac constraints on the Hilbert space. From this, we can establish a firm foundation for the canonical quantization of superconformal gravity. The purpose of writing down the Hamiltonian form of the theory is to reexamine the question of renormalization and unitarity. Usually, we start with unitary theories of gravity, such as the Einstein-Hilbert action or supergravity, both of which are probably not renormalizable. In this series of papers, we take the opposite approach and start with a theory which is renormalizable but has problems with unitarity. Conformal and superconformal gravity are both plagued with dipole ghosts when we use perturbation theory to quantize the theories. It is difficult to interpret the results of perturbation theory because the asymptotic states have zero norm and the potential between particles grows linearly with the separation distance. The purpose of writing the Hamiltonian form of these theories is to approach the question of unitarity from a different point of view. For example, a strong-coupling approach to these theories may yield a totally different perturbation expansion. We speculate that canonically quantizing the theory by power expanding in the strong-coupling regime may yield a different set of asymptotic states, somewhat similar to the situation in gauge theories. In this series of papers, we wish to reopen the question of the unitarity of conformal theories. We conjecture that ghosts are "confined."