Thermal and spectral dimension of (generalized) Snyder noncommutative spacetimes

Abstract

We report an investigation of the Snyder noncommutative spacetime and of some of its most natural generalizations, also looking at them as a powerful tool for comparing different notions of dimensionality of a quantum spacetime. It is known that (generalized-)Snyder noncommutativity, while having rich off-shell implications (kinematical Hilbert space), does not affect noninteracting on-shell particles (physical Hilbert space), and we argue that physically meaningful notions of dimensionality should describe such spacetimes as trivially four-dimensional, without any running with scales. By studying the thermodynamics of a gas of massless particles living on these spacetimes, we find that indeed the Snyder model and its generalizations have constant thermal dimension of four. We also compute the spectral dimension of the Snyder model and its generalizations, finding that, as a result of its sensitivity to off-shell properties, it runs from the standard value of four in the infrared towards lower values in the ultraviolet limit.