This is a Ph.D. thesis that presents the author's findings in the area of Causal Dynamical Triangulations. In compliance with Jagiellonian University of Krak\'ow regulations, the document consists of six publications and a general summary, which serves as a guide to assist readers in navigating through the publications. Although the six publications that constitute the main content of the thesis are not included in this version of the text on arXiv, they are referred to frequently throughout the document. The original document is available at the following link: https://fais.uj.edu.pl/documents/41628/150115897/Thesis_DN-skompresowany.pdf

A model with a half boson degree of freedom per lattice site in one dimension is developed. The boson is protected from developing a gap by translation symmetry: while the left movers are at zero quasi-momentum, the associated right movers are at the midpoint of the quasi-momentum period. The model has different properties depending on if a periodic lattice has an even or an odd number of sites and similar features are found for open boundary conditions. A special case of the non-linear half boson model where even and odd lattice sites contribute differently to the Hamiltonian gives rise to the Toda chain and a more symmetric generalization of the Toda chain is found. Upon periodic identifications of the half bosons degrees of freedom under a shift, the total Hilbert space has a finite dimension and can be encoded in finitely many qubits per unit length. This way one finds interesting critical spin chains, examples of which include the critical Ising model in a transverse magnetic field and the 3-state Potts model at criticality. Extensions to higher dimensions are considered. Models obtained this way automatically produce dynamical systems of gapless fractons.

We apply the QCD sum rule method to study the double-gluon hybrid states with the quark-gluon contents $\bar q q gg$ ($q=u/d$) and $\bar s s gg$. We construct twenty-eight double-gluon hybrid currents, eleven of which are found to be zero due to some internal symmetries between the two gluons fields. We concentrate on the non-vanishing currents with the exotic quantum numbers $J^{PC} = 1^{-+}$ and $3^{-+}$. Their masses are calculated to be $M_{|\bar q q gg;1^{-+}\rangle} = 4.35^{+0.26}_{-0.30}$ GeV, $M_{|\bar s s gg;1^{-+}\rangle} = 4.49^{+0.25}_{-0.30}$ GeV, $M_{|\bar q q gg;3^{-+}\rangle} = 3.02^{+0.24}_{-0.31}$ GeV, and $M_{|\bar s s gg;3^{-+}\rangle} = 3.16^{+0.22}_{-0.28}$ GeV. The decay behaviors of the $J^{PC} = 3^{-+}$ states are studied, and we propose to search for them in the $\pi a_1(1260)/\rho \omega/\phi \phi$ channels in future particle experiments.

The three-particle $K$-matrix, $\mathcal{K}_{\mathrm{df},3}$, is a scheme-dependent quantity that parametrizes short-range three-particle interactions in the relativistic-field-theory three-particle finite-volume formalism. In this work, we compute its value for systems of three pions at maximal isospin through next-to-leading order (NLO) in Chiral Perturbation Theory (ChPT). We compare the values to existing lattice QCD results and find that the agreement between lattice QCD data and ChPT in the first two coefficients of the threshold expansion of $\mathcal{K}_{\mathrm{df},3}$ is significantly improved with respect to leading order once NLO effects are incorporated.