The Ponzano-Regge cylinder and Propagator for 3d quantum gravity

Abstract: We investigate the propagator of 3d quantum gravity, formulated as a discrete topological path integral. We define it as the Ponzano-Regge amplitude of the solid cylinder swept by a 2d disk evolving in time. Quantum states for a 2d disk live in the tensor products of N spins, where N is the number of holonomy insertions connecting to the disk boundary. We formulate the cylindric amplitude in terms of a transfer matrix and identify its eigen-modes in terms of spin recoupling. We show that the propagator distinguishes the subspaces with different total spin and may select the vanishing total spin sector at late time depending on the chosen cylinder boundary data. We discuss applications to quantum circuits and the possibility of experimental simulations of this 3d quantum gravity propagator.