Related papers: Spin Foams Without Spins

While the use of spin networks has greatly improved our understanding of the kinematical aspects of quantum gravity, the dynamical aspects remain obscure. To address this problem, we define the concept of a `spin foam' going from one spin…

We construct a class of spin foam models describing matter coupled to gravity, such that the gravitational sector is described by the unitary irreducible representations of the appropriate symmetry group, while the matter sector is…

It has been recently shown that a certain non-topological spin foam model can be obtained from the Feynman expansion of a field theory over a group. The field theory defines a natural ``sum over triangulations'', which removes the cut off…

We construct a generating functional for the exact evalutation of a coherent representation of spin network amplitudes. This generating functional is defined for arbitrary graphs and depends only on a pair of spinors for each edge. The…

We extend the formalism of embedded spin networks and spin foams to include topological data that encode the underlying three-manifold or four-manifold as a branched cover. These data are expressed as monodromies, in a way similar to the…

We study perturbation theory for spin foam models on triangulated manifolds. Starting with any model of this sort, we consider an arbitrary perturbation of the vertex amplitudes, and write the evolution operators of the perturbed model as…

We review the dual transformation from pure lattice gauge theory to spin foam models with an emphasis on a geometric viewpoint. This allows us to give a simple dual formulation of SU(N) Yang-Mills theory, where spin foam surfaces are…

In this series of three papers, we generalize the derivation of dual photons and monopoles by Polyakov, and Banks, Myerson and Kogut, to obtain approximative models of SU(2) lattice gauge theory. Our approach is based on stationary phase…

We propose a new holonomy formulation for spin foams, which naturally extends the theory space of lattice gauge theories. This allows current spin foam models to be defined on arbitrary two-complexes as well as to generalize current spin…

We construct the spin foam model for N=2 supergravity in three dimensions. Classically, it is a BF theory with gauge algebra osp(2|2). This algebra has representations which are not completely reducible. This complicates the procedure when…

"The Spin Foams for People Without the 3d/4d Imagination" could be an alternative title of our work. We derive spin foams from operator spin network diagrams} we introduce. Our diagrams are the spin network analogy of the Feynman diagrams.…

In this thesis I review the definition of topological quantum field theories through state sums on triangulated manifolds. I describe the construction of state sum invariants of 3-manifolds from a graphical calculus and show how to evaluate…

Spin foams are candidate state-sum models for transition amplitudes in quantum gravity. An active research subject is to identify the possible divergences of spin foam models, or alternatively to show that models are finite. We will discuss…

Spin foam vertex amplitudes are the key ingredient of spin foam models for quantum gravity. These fall into the realm of discretized path integral, and can be seen as generalized lattice gauge theories. They can be seen as an attempt at a…

Current theories of particle physics, including the standard model, are dominated by the paradigm that nature is basically translation invariant. Deviations from translation invariance are described by the action of forces. General…

Spin foams provide path integrals for quantum gravity, which employ discretizations as regulator. To obtain regulator independent predictions, we must remove these fiducial structures in a suitable refinement limit. In this chapter we…

Just as 3d state sum models, including 3d quantum gravity, can be built using categories of group representations, "2-categories of 2-group representations" may provide interesting state sum models for 4d quantum topology, if not quantum…

Numerical methods in spin-foam models have significantly advanced in the last few years, yet challenges remain in efficiently extracting results for amplitudes with many quantum degrees of freedom. In this paper we sketch a proposal for a…

We derive an exact duality transformation for pure non-Abelian gauge theory regularized on a lattice. The duality transformation can be applied to gauge theory with an arbitrary compact Lie group G as the gauge group and on Euclidean…

So far spin foam models are hardly understood beyond a few of their basic building blocks. To make progress on this question, we define analogue spin foam models, so called spin nets, for quantum groups $\text{SU}(2)_k$ and examine their…