Related papers: Limiting fluctuations in quantum gravity to diffeo…
It is generally believed that a full-fledged theory of quantum gravity should exhibit background independence and diffeomorphism invariance. In its most general form, the latter comprises field redefinitions, which are diffeomorphisms in…
We formally prove the existence of a quantization procedure that makes the path integral of a general diffeomorphism-invariant theory of gravity, with fixed total spacetime volume, equivalent to that of its unimodular version. This is…
Using the Batalin-Vilkovisky technique and the background field method the proof of gauge invariant renormalizability is elaborated for a generic model of quantum gravity which is diffeomorphism invariant and has no other, potentially…
The scale dependent effective average action for quantum gravity complies with the fundamental principle of Background Independence. Ultimately the background metric it formally depends on is selected self-consistently by means of a…
We investigate off-shell perturbative renormalisation of pure quantum gravity for both background metric and quantum fluctuations. We show that at each new loop order, the divergences that do not vanish on-shell are constructed from only…
We analyze the problem of general covariance for quantum gravity theories in the background field formalism with respect to gauge fixing procedure. We prove that the background effective action is not invariant under general coordinate…
We evaluate the phase diagram of quantum gravity within a fully diffeomorphism-invariant renormalisation group approach. The construction is based on the geometrical or Vilkovisky-DeWitt effective action. We also resolve the difference…
We apply the new quantization scheme outlined in Phys. Rev. D102 (2020) 125001 to explore the influence which quantum vacuum fluctuations of the spacetime metric exert on the universes of Quantum Einstein Gravity, which is regarded an…
Inertial and gravitational mass or energy-momentum need not be the same for virtual quantum states. Separating their roles naturally leads to the gauge theory of volume-preserving diffeomorphisms of an inner four-dimensional space. The…
We develop a quantum effective action for scalar-tensor theories of gravity which is both spacetime diffeomorphism invariant and field reparameterisation (frame) invariant beyond the classical approximation. We achieve this by extending the…
The different roles and natures of spacetime appearing in a quantum field theory and in classical physics are analyzed implying that a quantum theory of gravitation is not necessarily a quantum theory of curved spacetime. Developing an…
We analyse the gauge-dependence of the effective action in an interacting quantum theory of gravitational and matter fields. An explicit off-shell result is obtained in a general background gauge at one-loop order, which reduces in a…
Quantum General Relativity (QGR), sometimes called Loop Quantum Gravity, has matured over the past fifteen years to a mathematically rigorous candidate quantum field theory of the gravitational field. The features that distinguish it from…
We propose fundamental scale invariance as a new theoretical principle beyond renormalizability. Quantum field theories with fundamental scale invariance admit a scale-free formulation of the functional integral and effective action in…
The current understanding of renormalization in quantum gravity (QG) is based on the fact that UV divergences of effective actions in the covariant QG models are covariant local expressions. This fundamental statement plays a central role…
There is a precise sense in which the requirement of background independence suffices to uniquely select the kinematics of loop quantum gravity (LQG). Specifically, the fundamental kinematic algebra of LQG admits a unique diffeomorphism…
Boundary conditions play a crucial role in the path-integral approach to quantum gravity and quantum cosmology, as well as in the current attempts to understand the one-loop semiclassical properties of quantum field theories. Within this…
A quantum hamiltonian which evolves the gravitational field according to time as measured by constant surfaces of a scalar field is defined through a regularization procedure based on the loop representation, and is shown to be finite and…
We construct a manifestly diffeomorphism invariant Wilsonian (Exact) Renormalization Group for classical gravity, and begin the construction for quantum gravity. We demonstrate that the effective action can be computed without gauge fixing…
We describe the definition and the role background independence and the closely related notion of diffeomorphism invariance play in modern string theory. These important concepts are transformed by a new understanding of gauge redundancies…