Fermions and Topology

The canonical theory of quantum gravity in the loop representation can be extended to incorporate topology change, in the simple case that this refers to the creation or annihilation of "minimalist wormholes" in which two points of the spatial manifold are identified. Furthermore, if the states of the wormholes threaded by loop states are taken to be antisymmetrized under the permutation of wormhole mouths, as required by the relation between spin and statistics, then the quantum theory of pure general relativity, without matter but with minimalist wormholes, is shown to be equivalent to the quantum theory of general relativity coupled to a single Weyl fermion field, at both the kinematical and diffeomorphism invariant levels. The correspondence is also shown to extend to the action of the dynamics generated by the Hamiltonian constraint, on a large subspace of the physical state space, and is thus conjectured to be completely general.