Related papers: Four-dimensional Quantum Gravity with a Cosmologic…
We complement Weinberg's no go theorem on the cosmological constant problem in quantum gravity by generalizing it to the case of a scale-invariant theory. Our analysis makes use of the effective action and the BRST symmetry in a manifestly…
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…
A diverse set of observations now compellingly suggest that Universe possesses a nonzero cosmological constant. In the context of quantum-field theory a cosmological constant corresponds to the energy density of the vacuum, and the wanted…
Loop Quantum Gravity (LQG) is an attempt to describe the quantum gravity regime. Introducing a non-zero cosmological constant $\Lambda$ in this context has been a withstanding problem. Other approaches, such as Chern-Simons gravity, suggest…
Liouville theory is shown to describe the asymptotic dynamics of three-dimensional Einstein gravity with a negative cosmological constant. This is because (i) Chern-Simons theory with a gauge group $SL(2,R) \times SL(2,R)$ on a space-time…
Recent work on the loop representation of quantum gravity has revealed previously unsuspected connections between knot theory and quantum gravity, or more generally, 3-dimensional topology and 4-dimensional generally covariant physics. We…
I describe an approach which connects classical gravity with the quantum microstructure of spacetime. The field equations arise from maximizing the density of states of matter plus geometry. The former is identified using the thermodynamics…
We relate three-dimensional loop quantum gravity to the combinatorial quantisation formalism based on the Chern-Simons formulation for three-dimensional Lorentzian and Euclidean gravity with vanishing cosmological constant. We compare the…
We study a Newtonian cosmological model in the context of a noncommutative space. It is shown that the trajectories of a test particle undergo modifications such that it no longer satisfies the cosmological principle. For the case of a…
Large-distance modification of gravity may be the mechanism for solving the cosmological constant problem. A simple model of the large-distance modification -- four-dimensional (4D) gravity with the hard mass term-- is problematic from the…
We compute the 4--dimensional cosmological constant in string compactifications in which the Standard Model fields live on a non-supersymmetric brane inside a supersymmetric bulk. The cosmological constant receives contributions only from…
Recently, a new framework for describing the multiverse has been proposed which is based on the principles of quantum mechanics. The framework allows for well-defined predictions, both regarding global properties of the universe and…
In the Chern-Simons formulation of Einstein gravity in 2+1 dimensions the phase space of gravity is the moduli space of flat G-connections, where G is a typically non-compact Lie group which depends on the signature of space-time and the…
Considering the Barrett-Crane spin foam model for quantum gravity with (positive) cosmological constant, we show that speeds must be quantized and we investigate the physical implications of this effect such as the emergence of an effective…
It is postulated that quantum gravity is a sum over causal structures coupled to matter via scale evolution. Quantized causal structures can be described by studying simple matrix models where matrices are replaced by an algebra of quantum…
The cosmological constant induced by quantum fluctuation of the graviton on a given background is considered as a tool for building a spectrum of different geometries. In particular, we apply the method to the Schwarzschild background with…
We review some aspects of quantum gravity in the context of cosmology. In particular, we focus on models with a phenomenology accessible to current and near-future observations, as the early Universe might be our only chance to peep through…
We consider the problem of identifying the CFT's that may be dual to pure gravity in three dimensions with negative cosmological constant. The c-theorem indicates that three-dimensional pure gravity is consistent only at certain values of…
We show that it is possible to solve the cosmological constant (CC) problem in a discrete quantum gravity theory based on Regge calculus by using the effective action approach and a special path-integral measure. The effective cosmological…
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…