Wilson loops in nonperturbative quantum gravity

Abstract

By explicit construction, we show that one can in a simple way introduce and measure gravitational holonomies and Wilson loops in lattice formulations of nonperturbative quantum gravity based on (causal) dynamical triangulations. We use this setup to investigate a class of Wilson line observables associated with the world line of a point particle coupled to quantum gravity, and deduce from their expectation values that the underlying holonomies cover the group manifold of SO(4) uniformly.