Related papers: Spin foams
This paper is twofold. First of all a complete unified picture of $n$-dimensional quantum gravity is proposed in the following sense: In spin foam models of quantum gravity the evaluation of spin networks play a very important role. These…
Spin liquids are quantum phases of matter that exhibit a variety of novel features associated with their topological character. These include various forms of fractionalization - elementary excitations that behave as fractions of an…
We give a brief and a critical review of the Barret-Crane spin foam models of quantum gravity. Then we describe two new spin foam models which are obtained by direct quantization of General Relativity and do not have some of the drawbacks…
We give a general definition of spin foam models, and then of models of 4d quantum gravity based on constraining BF theory. We highlight the construction and quantization ambiguities entering model building, among which the choice of…
The path-integral approach to cosmology consists in the computation of transition amplitudes between states of the quantum geometry of the universe. In the past, the concrete computation of these transitions amplitudes has been performed in…
This article has been replaced by gr-qc/0412011
One of the main results in canonical quantum gravity is the introduction of spin network states as a basis on the space of kinematical states. To arrive at the physical state space of the theory though we need to understand the dynamics of…
The new information-theoretic Process Physics has shown that space is a quantum foam system with gravity being, in effect, an inhomogeneous in-flow of the quantum foam into matter. The theory predicts that absolute motion with respect to…
The space-time foam formulas, quoted below in Eqs (1) and (3), express the minimal amount of quantum uncertainty to be introduced into the structure of the Einsteinian space-time in order to make that structure compatible with quantum…
We describe how a spin-foam state sum model can be reformulated as a quantum field theory of spin networks, such that the Feynman diagrams of that field theory are the spin-foam amplitudes. In the case of open spin networks, we obtain a new…
We present some modern theories on the structure of spacetime that can be classified as relational theories in the direction of Leibniz's ontology. In order to analyze the nature of spacetime we consider three levels of knowledge…
A spin-foam model is derived from the canonical model of Loop Quantum Gravity coupled to a massless scalar field. We generalized to the full theory the scheme first proposed in the context of Loop Quantum Cosmology by Ashtekar, Campiglia…
Spin foam models of quantum gravity are based on Plebanski's formulation of general relativity as a constrained BF theory. We give an alternative formulation of gravity as BF theory plus a certain potential term for the B-field. When the…
Quantum spin liquids may be considered "quantum disordered" ground states of spin systems, in which zero point fluctuations are so strong that they prevent conventional magnetic long range order. More interestingly, quantum spin liquids are…
The most common spin foam models of gravity are widely believed to be discrete path integral quantizations of the Plebanski action. However, their derivation in present formulations is incomplete and lower dimensional simplex amplitudes are…
Spinorial tools have recently come back to fashion in loop gravity and spin foams. They provide an elegant tool relating the standard holonomy-flux algebra to the twisted geometry picture of the classical phase space on a fixed graph, and…
An effective model for the spacetime foam is constructed in terms of nonlocal interactions in a classical background. In the weak-coupling approximation, the evolution of the low-energy density matrix is determined by a master equation that…
We consider quantum transition amplitudes, partition functions and observables for 3D spin foam models within $SU(2)$ quantum group deformation symmetry, where the deformation parameter is a complex fifth root of unity. By considering…
Understanding the large-scale physics is crucial for the spin foam approach to quantum gravity. We tackle this challenge from a statistical physics perspective using simplified, yet feature-rich models. In particular, this allows us to…
Loop Quantum Gravity is now a well established approach to quantum gravity. One of the main challenges still faced by the theory is constructing a consistent dynamics which would lead back to the standard dynamics of the gravitational field…