Worldlines as Wilson Lines
Abstract
Description
Gravitational theories do not admit gauge invariant local operators. We study the limits under which there exists a quasi-local description for a class of non-local gravitational observables where a sum over worldlines plays the role of the Wilson line for gauge theory observables. We study non-local corrections to the local description and circumstances where these corrections become large. We find that these operators are quasi-local in flat space and AdS, but fail to be quasi-local in de Sitter space.
20 pages
20 pages