Related papers: Observables need not be diffeomorphism invariant i…
A local observer can measure only the values of fields at the point of his own position. By exploring the coordinate transformation between two Fermi frames, it is shown that two observers, having the same instantaneous position and…
It is believed that gravity will be explained in the framework of the existing quantum theory when one succeeds in eliminating divergencies at large momenta or small distances (although the phenomenon of gravity has been observed only at…
The most general dilaton gravity theory in 2 spacetime dimensions is considered. A Hamiltonian analysis is performed and the reduced phase space, which is two dimensional, is explicitly constructed in a suitable parametrization of the…
We discuss the fate of diffeomorphism symmetry in discrete gravity. Diffeomorphism symmetry is typically broken by the discretization. This has repercussions for the observable content and the canonical formulation of the theory. It might…
In the past years, black holes and the fate of their singularity have been heavily studied within loop quantum gravity. Effective spacetime descriptions incorporating quantum geometry corrections are provided by the so-called polymer…
Geometric properties of operators of quantum Dirac constraints and physical observables are studied in semiclassical theory of generic constrained systems. The invariance transformations of the classical theory -- contact canonical…
The notion of diffeomorphism invariance and general covariance are conceptually delicate issues for the field equations and the actions. A thorough study on the original Einstein field equation and its two modifications by Einstein is…
A differential calculus is set up on a deformation of the oscillator algebra. It is uniquely determined by the requirement of invariance under a seven-dimensional quantum group. The quantum space and its associated differential calculus are…
Lorentz and diffeomorphism violations are studied in linearized gravity using effective field theory. A classification of all gauge-invariant and gauge-violating terms is given. The exact covariant dispersion relation for gravitational…
We study the quantization of spherically symmetric vacuum spacetimes within loop quantum gravity. In particular, we give additional details about our previous work in which we showed that one could complete the quantization the model and…
We study the cosmological implications of gravity models which break diffeomorphisms (Diff) invariance down to transverse diffeomorphisms (TDiff). We start from the most general gravitational action involving up to quadratic terms in…
The ``generic'' family of classical sequential growth dynamics for causal sets provides cosmological models of causal sets which are a testing ground for ideas about the, as yet unknown, quantum theory. In particular we can investigate how…
The covariance of loop quantum gravity studies of spherically symmetric space-times has recently been questioned. This is a reasonable worry, given that they are formulated in terms of slicing-dependent variables. We show explicitly that…
The diffeomorphism symmetry of general relativity leads in the canonical formulation to constraints, which encode the dynamics of the theory. These constraints satisfy a complicated algebra, known as Dirac's hypersurface deformation…
Diffeomorphism invariance breaking has been investigated in the literature in several contexts, including emergent General Relativity (GR). If GR emerges from an underlying theory without diffeomorphism invariance, there may be small…
We study the general class of gravitational field theories constructed on the basis of scale invariance (and therefore absence of any mass parameters) and invariance under transverse diffeomorphisms (TDiff), which are the 4-volume…
Quantum field theory is assumed to be gauge invariant. However it is well known that when certain quantities are calculated using perturbation theory the results are not gauge invariant. The non-gauge invariant terms have to be removed in…
A review of some errors made by the author and others in their search for quantum models of gravity in cosmological space-times that asymptote to de Sitter (dS) space in the future. The "static de Sitter Hamiltonian", which measures the…
We combine the "evolving constants" approach to the construction of observables in canonical quantum gravity with the Page--Wootters formulation of quantum mechanics with a relational time for generally covariant systems. This overcomes the…
Recently a scale invariant theory of gravity was constructed by imposing a conformal symmetry on general relativity. The imposition of this symmetry changed the configuration space from superspace - the space of all Riemannian 3-metrics…