Gauges and functional measures in quantum gravity I: Einstein theory

Abstract: We perform a general computation of the off-shell one-loop divergences in Einstein gravity, in a two-parameter family of path integral measures, corresponding to different ways of parametrizing the graviton field, and a two-parameter family of gauges. Trying to reduce the gauge- and measure-dependence selects certain classes of measures and gauges respectively. There is a choice of two parameters (corresponding to the exponential parametrization and the partial gauge condition that the quantum field be traceless) that automatically eliminates the dependence on the remaining two parameters and on the cosmological constant. We observe that the divergences are invariant under a $\mathbf{Z}_2$ "duality" transformation that (in a particularly important special case) involves the replacement of the densitized metric by a densitized inverse metric as the fundamental quantum variable. This singles out a formulation of unimodular gravity as the unique "self-dual" theory in this class.