Related papers: A note on the secondary simplicity constraints in …
Vacuum quasi-topological gravity with infinitely many terms in the action satisfies Markov's limiting curvature hypothesis: the spherically symmetric solutions are regular and all curvature invariants are bounded by solution-independent…
In this work, we provide a global condition for contraction with respect to an invariant Riemannian metric on reductive homogeneous spaces. Using left-invariant frames, vector fields on the manifold are horizontally lifted to the ambient…
It is well known that the SU(2)-gauge invariant phase space of loop gravity can be represented in terms of twisted geometries. These are piecewise-linear-flat geometries obtained by gluing together polyhedra, but the resulting geometries…
Spin Foam Models (SFMs) are covariant formulations of Loop Quantum Gravity (LQG) in 4 dimensions. This work studies the perturbations of SFMs on a flat background. It demonstrates for the first time that smooth curved spacetime geometries…
We use gauge theoretic and algebraic methods to examine sufficient conditions for smooth points on the moduli space of flat connections on a compact manifold and on the character variety of a finitely generated and presented group. We give…
We introduce $q$-deformed connections on the quantum 2-sphere and 3-sphere, satisfying a twisted Leibniz rule in analogy with $q$-deformed derivations. We show that such connections always exist on projective modules. Furthermore, a…
The Lorentzian Hamiltonian constraint is solved for isotropic loop quantum cosmology coupled to a massless scalar field. As in the Euclidean case, the discreteness of quantum geometry removes the classical singularity from the quantum…
We propose an exact Hamiltonian lattice theory for (2+1)-dimensional spacetimes with homogeneous curvature. By gauging away the lattice we find a generalization of the ``polygon representation'' of (2+1)-dimensional gravity. We compute the…
Twisted geometry is a piecewise-flat geometry less rigid than Regge geometry. In Loop Gravity, it provides the classical limit for each step of the truncation utilized in the definition of the quantum theory. We define the torsionless…
Standard Regge Calculus provides an interesting method to explore quantum gravity in a non-perturbative fashion but turns out to be a CPU-time demanding enterprise. One therefore seeks for suitable approximations which retain most of its…
The building blocks of a quantum theory of general relativity are expected to be discrete structures. Loop quantum gravity is formulated using a basis of spin networks (wave functions over oriented graphs with coloured edges), thus…
In the context of loop quantum gravity and spinfoam models, the simplicity constraints are essential in that they allow to write general relativity as a constrained topological BF theory. In this work, we apply the recently developed U(N)…
We propose a hybrid model of simplicial quantum gravity by performing at once dynamical triangulations and Regge calculus. A motive for the hybridization is to give a dynamical description of topology-changing processes of Euclidean…
This manuscript is the first in a series of instalments that investigate spherically symmetric solutions within the effective dynamics program of Loop Quantum Gravity. The choice of lattice is adapted such that it remains invariant under a…
We investigate the geometry and topology of compact submanifolds of arbitrary codimension in space forms satisfying a certain pinching condition involving the length of the second fundamental form and the mean curvature. We prove that this…
We reconsider the Rovelli-Smolin model of gravity coupled to the Klein-Gordon time field with an eye towards capturing the degrees of freedom of the scalar field lost in the framework in which time is deparametrized by the scalar field.…
We demonstrate in detail how the space of two-dimensional quantum field theories can be parametrized by off-shell states of a free closed string moving in a flat background. The dynamic equation corresponding to the condition of conformal…
Finding diffeomorphism-invariant observables to characterize the properties of gravity and spacetime at the Planck scale is essential for making progress in quantum gravity. The holonomy and Wilson loop of the Levi-Civita connection are…
Theories of gravity are fundamentally a relation between matter and the geometric structure of the underlying spacetime. So once we put some additional restrictions on the spacetime geometry, the theory of gravity is bound to get the…
Spin foams of 4d gravity were recently extended from complexes with purely spacelike surfaces to complexes that also contain timelike surfaces. In this article, we express the associated partition function in terms of vertex amplitudes and…