Related papers: Is Quantum Gravity a Chern-Simons Theory?
We propose a generalization of Chiral Gravity, which follows from considering a Chern-Simons action for the spin connection with anti-symmetric contorsion. The theory corresponds to Topologically Massive Gravity at the chiral point…
Chern-Simons Theories with gauge super-groups appear naturally in string theory and they possess interesting applications in mathematics, e.g. for the construction of knot and link invariants. This paper is the first in a series where we…
I argue that the (extended) Standard Model (SM) of particle physics and the renormalizable Feynman-Weinberg theory of quantum gravity comprise a theory of everything. I show that imposing the appropriate cosmological boundary conditions…
We present a candidate quantum field theory of gravity with dynamical critical exponent equal to z=3 in the UV. (As in condensed matter systems, z measures the degree of anisotropy between space and time.) This theory, which at short…
Two main gauge invariant off-shell models are studied in this Thesis. I) Poincare-invariant topological gravity in even dimensions is formulated as a transgression field theory whose gauge connections are associated to linear and nonlinear…
The Chern-Weil topological theory is applied to a classical formulation of general relativity in four-dimensional spacetime. Einstein--Hilbert gravitational action is shown to be invariant with respect to a novel translation…
It is well-known that quantum groups are relevant to describe the quantum regime of 3d gravity. They encode a deformation of the gauge symmetries parametrized by the value of the cosmological constant. They appear as a form of…
The general procedure for obtaining explicit expressions for all cohomologies of N.Berkovits's operator is suggested. It is demonstrated that calculation of BV integral for the classical Chern-Simons-like theory (Witten's OSFT-like theory)…
Instantons, monopoles and vortices have become paradigms of topological structures in field theory and quantum mechanics, with important applications in particle physics, astrophysics, condensed matter physics and mathematics. We have…
"Causal Dynamical Triangulations" (CDT) represent a lattice regularization of the sum over spacetime histories, providing us with a non-perturbative formulation of quantum gravity. The ultraviolet fixed points of the lattice theory can be…
We use the idea of the symmetry between the spacetime coordinates x^\mu and the energy-momentum p^\mu in quantum theory to construct a momentum space quantum gravity geometry with a metric s_{\mu\nu} and a curvature P^\lambda_{\mu\nu\rho}.…
A class of the $D=4$ gravity models describing a coupled system of $n$ Abelian vector fields and the symmetric $n \times n$ matrix generalizations of the dilaton and Kalb-Ramond fields is considered. It is shown that the Pecci-Quinn axion…
We consider functional-integral quantisation of the moduli of all quantum metrics defined as square-lengths $a$ on the edges of a Lorentzian square graph. We determine correlation functions and find a fixed relative uncertainty $\Delta…
We propose a precise reformulation of 3d quantum gravity with negative cosmological constant in terms of a topological quantum field theory based on the quantization of the Teichm\"uller space of Riemann surfaces that we refer to as…
A new approach to the quantization of Chern-Simons theory has been developed in recent papers of the author. It uses a "simulation" of the moduli space of flat connections modulo the gauge group which reveals to be related to a lattice…
We study a five-dimensional non-relativistic gravity theory whose action is composed of a gravitational sector and a sector of matter where the gravitational sector is given by the so called Newton--Chern--Simons gravity and where the…
This thesis studies the algebro-geometric aspects of supersymmetric abelian gauge theories in three dimensions. The supersymmetric vacua are demonstrated to exhibit a window phenomenon in Chern-Simons levels, which is analogous to the…
We describe the construction of quantum gravity, i.e. of a theory of self-interacting massless spin-2 quantum gauge fields, the gravitons, on flat space-time, in the framework of causal perturbation theory.
I argue that the complete partition function of 3D quantum gravity is given by a path integral over gauge-inequivalent manifolds times the Chern-Simons partition function. In a discrete version, it gives a sum over simplicial complexes…
We explain how quantum gravity can be defined by quantizing spacetime itself. A pinpoint is that the gravitational constant G = L_P^2 whose physical dimension is of (length)^2 in natural unit introduces a symplectic structure of spacetime…