Related papers: How round is the quantum de Sitter universe?
Curvature is a key notion in General Relativity, characterizing the local physical properties of spacetime. By contrast, the concept of curvature has received scant attention in nonperturbative quantum gravity. One may even wonder whether…
Previous work has shown that the macroscopic structure of the theory of quantum gravity defined by causal dynamical triangulations (CDT) is compatible with that of a de Sitter universe. After emphasizing the strictly nonperturbative nature…
Quantum Ricci curvature has been introduced recently as a new, geometric observable characterizing the curvature properties of metric spaces, without the need for a smooth structure. Besides coordinate invariance, its key features are…
This thesis investigates low-dimensional models of nonperturbative quantum gravity, with a special focus on Causal Dynamical Triangulations (CDT). We define the so-called curvature profile, a new quantum gravitational observable based on…
The dynamical generation of a four-dimensional classical universe from nothing but fundamental quantum excitations at the Planck scale is a long-standing challenge to theoretical physicists. A candidate theory of quantum gravity which…
A universe much like the (Euclidean) de Sitter space-time appears as background geometry in the causal dynamical triangulation (CDT) regularization of quantum gravity. We study the geometry of such universes which appear in the path…
In the approach of Causal Dynamical Triangulations (CDT), quantum gravity is obtained as a scaling limit of a non-perturbative path integral over space-times whose causal structure plays a crucial role in the construction. After some…
Flatness -- the absence of spacetime curvature -- is a well-understood property of macroscopic, classical spacetimes in general relativity. The same cannot be said about the concepts of curvature and flatness in nonperturbative quantum…
Motivated by the search for geometric observables in nonperturbative quantum gravity, we define a notion of coarse-grained Ricci curvature. It is based on a particular way of extracting the local Ricci curvature of a smooth Riemannian…
We argue that theories of quantum gravity constructed with the help of (Causal) Dynamical Triangulations have given us the most informative, quantitative models to date of quantum spacetime. Most importantly, these are derived dynamically…
In these lectures we describe how a theory of quantum gravity may be constructed in terms of a lattice formulation based on so-called causal dynamical triangulations (CDT). We discuss how the continuum limit can be obtained and how to…
Three-dimensional Lorentzian quantum gravity, expressed as the continuum limit of a nonperturbative sum over spacetimes, is tantalizingly close to being amenable to analytical methods, and some of its properties have been described in terms…
We show that the quantum universe emerging from a nonperturbative, Lorentzian sum-over-geometries can be described with high accuracy by a four-dimensional de Sitter spacetime. By a scaling analysis involving Newton's constant, we establish…
Describing dynamics in a gravitational universe with positive cosmological constant, such as de Sitter space, is a conceptually challenging problem. We propose a principle for constructing a quantum system that can potentially be used to…
We present a detailed analysis of a recently introduced version of Causal Dynamical Triangulations (CDT) that does not rely on a distinguished time slicing. Focussing on the case of 2+1 spacetime dimensions, we analyze its geometric and…
This article discusses the infrared and the (perspective) ultraviolet limits of four-dimensional Causal Dynamical Triangulations (CDT). CDT is a non-perturabtive and background-independent approach to quantization of Einstein's gravity,…
We sketch the construction of a quantum model of 3 dimensional de Sitter space, based on the Covariant Entropy Principle and the observation that semi-classical physics suggests the possibility of a consistent theory of a finite number of…
Building on the recently introduced notion of quantum Ricci curvature and motivated by considerations in nonperturbative quantum gravity, we advocate a new, global observable for curved metric spaces, the curvature profile. It is obtained…
We propose a theory of quantum gravity which formulates the quantum theory as a nonperturbative path integral, where each spacetime history appears with a weight given by the exponentiated Einstein-Hilbert action of the corresponding causal…
We re-examine the nonperturbative curvature properties of two-dimensional Euclidean quantum gravity, obtained as the scaling limit of a path integral over dynamical triangulations of a two-sphere, which lies in the same universality class…