Related papers: Comments on Background Independence and Gauge Redu…
This paper concerns what Background Independence itself is (as opposed to some particular physical theory that is background independent). The notions presented mostly arose from a layer-by-layer analysis of the facets of the Problem of…
We propose a local renormalization group procedure where length scale is changed in spacetime dependent way. Combining this scheme with an earlier observation that high energy modes in renormalization group play the role of dynamical…
We formulate the Exact Renormalization Group on the string world sheet for closed string backgrounds. The same techniques that were used for open strings is used here. There are some subtleties. One is that holomorphic factorization of the…
Not only in physical string theories, but also in some highly simplified situations, background independence has been difficult to understand. It is argued that the ``holomorphic anomaly'' of Bershadsky, Cecotti, Ooguri, and Vafa gives a…
String field theory is supposed to stand to perturbative string theory as quantum field theory stands to single-particle quantum theory; as such, it purports to offer a substantially more general and powerful perspective on string theory…
This paper is a self contained review of the Loop Variable approach to string theory. The Exact Renormalization Group is applied to a world sheet theory describing string propagation in a general background involving both massless and…
One of the main features of covariant theories, in particular general relativity, is that the field equation possesses gauge freedom associated with global diffeomorphisms of the underlying manifold. I shall explain here how the hole…
Double field theory describes a massless subsector of closed string theory with both momentum and winding excitations. The gauge algebra is governed by the Courant bracket in certain subsectors of this double field theory. We construct the…
The recent formulation of locally covariant quantum field theory may open the way towards a background independent perturbative formulation of Quantum Gravity.
A framework for background independent open-string field theory is proposed. The approach involves using the BV formalism -- in a way suggested by recent developments in closed-string field theory -- to implicitly define a gauge invariant…
We consider the role of the diffeomorphism constraint in the quantization of lattice formulations of diffeomorphism invariant theories of connections. It has been argued that in working with abstract lattices, one automatically takes care…
It is shown that the gauge invariance and gauge dependence properties of effective action for Yang-Mills theories should be considered as two independent issues in the background field formalism. Application of this formalism to formulate…
We extend our investigation of the IR effects on the local dynamics of matter fields in quantum gravity. Specifically we clarify how the IR effects depend on the change of the quantization scheme: different parametrization of the metric and…
The application of the notion of `observable' from gauge theory to diffeomorphism-invariant theories -- most relevantly to general relativity -- has led to numerous conceptual and technical issues when interpreting classical theories with…
We discuss diffeomorphism and gauge invariant theories in three dimensions motivated by the fact that some models of interest do not have a suitable action description yet. The construction is based on a canonical representation of symmetry…
We analyze the conceptual role of background independence in the application of the effective average action to quantum gravity. Insisting on a background independent renormalization group (RG) flow the coarse graining operation must be…
Given a family of world-sheet superconformal field theories related by marginal deformation, we can formulate superstring field theory based on any of these world-sheet theories. Background independence is the statement that these different…
We investigate gravity as a gauge theory in the language of fiber bundles with tools from algebraic geometry. Compelled by the construction of the Eilenberg-MacLane classifying space via Fox derivations in an integral group ring, the origin…
The following two loosely connected sets of topics are reviewed in these lecture notes: 1) Gauge invariance, its treatment in field theories and its implications for internal symmetries and edge states such as those in the quantum Hall…
Gauge symmetries are often highlighted as a fundamental cornerstone of modern physics. But at the same time, it is commonly emphasized that gauge symmetries are not a fundamental feature of nature but merely redundancies in our description.…