Related papers: Topology and geometry cannot be measured by an ope…
Loop quantum cosmology is a symmetry reduced quantization of cosmological spacetimes based on loop quantum gravity. While it has been successful in resolution of various cosmological singularities and connecting Planck scale physics to…
Combining gravity with quantum theory is still work in progress. On the one hand, classical gravity, is the geometry of space-time determined by the energy-momentum tensor of matter and the resulting nonlinear equations; on the other hand,…
We address the issue of recovering the time-dependent Schr\"{o}dinger equation from quantum gravity in a natural way. To reach this aim it is necessary to understand the nonoccurrence of certain superpositions in quantum gravity. We explore…
It is shown that non-trivial topological sectors can prevent the quantum mechanical implementation of the symmetries of the classical field equations of sigma models with torsion. The associated anomaly is computed, and it is shown that it…
The present thesis is divided into two main research areas: Classical Cosmology and (Loop) Quantum Gravity. The first part concerns cosmological models with one phantom and one scalar field, that provide the `super-accelerated' scenario not…
The problem of quantization of general relativity is considered in the framework of noncommutative differential geometry. Operator analogues for interval, scalar curvature, values of the Einstein tensor are proposed. Quantum measurements of…
The research effort reported in this paper is directed, in a broad sense, towards understanding the small-scale structure of spacetime. The fundamental question that guides our discussion is ``what is the physical content of spacetime…
Four-dimensional gravity admits many equivalent formulations - metric, Einstein-Cartan, teleparallel, McDowell-Mansouri, among others - each offering distinct advantages, particularly, in view of quantization. We propose a new formulation…
The connection between topology and quantum mechanics is one of the cornerstones of modern physics. Several examples of current interest like the Aharonov-Bohm effect in quantum mechanics, monopoles and instantons in quantum field theory,…
This article gives an elementary account of the recently proposed theory of spontaneous quantum gravity. It is argued that a viable quantum theory of gravity should be falsifiable, and hence it should dynamically explain the observed…
A systematic analysis of the symmetries of topological 3D gravity with torsion and a cosmological term, in the first order formalism, has been performed in details - both in the hamiltonian and lagrangian formalisms. This illuminates the…
It has been shown that at the semi-classical order, gravitational theories with quantum fluctuations can be effectively recast as modified theories of gravity with non-minimal gravity-matter couplings. We proceed from an observational…
Topological gravity is the reduction of general relativity to flat space-times. A lattice model describing topological gravity is developed starting from a Hamiltonian lattice version of $B\w F$ theory. The extra symmetries not present in…
Spacetime geometry is twisted (deformed) into noncommutative spacetime geometry, where functions and tensors are now star-multiplied. Consistently, spacetime diffeomorhisms are twisted into noncommutative diffeomorphisms. Their deformed Lie…
We analyze the nonlinear optics of quasi one-dimensional quantum graphs and manipulate their topology and geometry to generate for the first time nonlinearities in a simple system approaching the fundamental limits of the first and second…
After a brief review of topological gravity, we present a superspace approach to this theory. This formulation allows us to recover in a natural manner various known results and to gain some insight into the precise relationship between…
The precise analog of the theta-quantization ambiguity of Yang-Mills theory exists for the real SU(2) connection formulation of general relativity. As in the former case theta labels representations of large gauge transformations, which are…
The concept of fixed-area states has proven useful for recent studies of quantum gravity, especially in connection with gravitational holography. We explore the Lorentz-signature spacetime geometry intrinsic to such fixed-area states in…
The transition from classical to quantum mechanics rests on the recognition that the structure of information is not what we thought it was: there are operational, i.e., phenomenal, probabilistic correlations that lie outside the polytope…
Noncommutative geometry is a mathematical framework that expresses the structure of space-time in terms of operator algebras. By using the tools of quantum mechanics to describe the geometry, noncommutative space-times are expected to give…