Spectral analysis of causal dynamical triangulations via finite element method

We examine the dual graph representation of simplicial manifolds in causal dynamical triangulations (CDT) as a means to build observables and propose a new representation based on the finite element methods (FEM). In particular, with the application of FEM techniques, we extract the (low-lying) spectrum of the Laplace-Beltrami (LB) operator on the Sobolev space H1 of scalar functions on piecewise flat manifolds and compare them with corresponding results obtained by using the dual graph representation. We show that, except for nonpathological cases in two dimensions, the dual graph spectrum and spectral dimension do not generally agree, neither quantitatively nor qualitatively, with the ones obtained from the LB operator on the continuous space. We analyze the reasons for this discrepancy and discuss its possible implications on the definition of generic observables built from the dual graph representation.