Singularity avoidance by collapsing shells in quantum gravity
General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology
2009-11-07 v1
Abstract
We discuss a model describing exactly a thin spherically symmetric shell of matter with zero rest mass. We derive the reduced formulation of this system in which the variables are embeddings, their conjugate momenta, and Dirac observables. A non-perturbative quantum theory of this model is then constructed, leading to a unitary dynamics. As a consequence of unitarity, the classical singularity is fully avoided in the quantum theory.
Cite
@article{arxiv.gr-qc/0107102,
title = {Singularity avoidance by collapsing shells in quantum gravity},
author = {Petr Hajicek and Claus Kiefer},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:gr-qc/0107102},
year = {2009}
}
Comments
5 pages, 1 figure, received honorable mention in the 2001 essay competititon, to appear in Int. J. Mod. Phys. D