Volume average regularization for the Wheeler-DeWitt equation

Abstract: In this article, I present a volume average regularization for the second functional derivative operator that appears in the metric-basis Wheeler-DeWitt equation. Naively, the second functional derivative operator in the Wheeler-DeWitt equation is infinite, since it contains terms with a factor of a delta function or derivatives of the delta function. More precisely, the second functional derivative contains terms that are only well defined as a distribution---these terms only yield meaningful results when they appear within an integral. The second functional derivative may, therefore, be regularized by performing an integral average of the distributional terms over some finite volume; I argue that such a regularization is appropriate if one regards quantum general relativity (from which the Wheeler-DeWitt equation may be derived) to be the low-energy effective field theory of a full theory of quantum gravity. I also show that a volume average regularization can be viewed as a natural generalization of the same-variable second partial derivative for an ordinary multivariable function. Using the regularized second functional derivative operator, I construct an approximate solution to the Wheeler-DeWitt equation in the low-curvature, long-distance limit.