Twistor representation of Jackiw-Teitelboim gravity

Abstract

Jackiw -Teitelboim (JT) gravity is a 1+1-dimensional toy model for quantum gravity in four spacetime dimensions. In the absence of matter, JT gravity is a topological field theory and there are no local observables. The introduction of a boundary changes the situation. What was an unphysical gauge direction before turns into a physical boundary degree of freedom (a gravitational edge mode). Starting from the BF formulation of JT gravity, we develop a twistor representation for the boundary charges of JT gravity. We introduce point sources in the bulk and study the coupled gravity plus matter system at the quantum level. Eigenstates of quasi-local energy are built from the tensor product of unitary irreducible representations of SL(2, R). Empty patches of AdS 2 are characterised by the continuous series representations, point sources are related to the discrete series. Physical states are constructed by fusing the SL(2, R) representations into an SL(2, R) invariant singlet. The singlet lies in the kernel of the constraints, which are the analogue of the Wheeler -DeWitt equations in the presence of distributional matter sources.