Related papers: Suppression of spacetime singularities in quantum …
One of the biggest challenges to theoretical physics of our time is to find a background-independent quantum theory of gravity. Today one encounters a profusion of different attempts at quantization, but no fully accepted - or acceptable,…
In two space-time dimensions, there is a theory of Lorentzian quantum gravity which can be defined by a rigorous, non-perturbative path integral and is inequivalent to the well-known theory of (Euclidean) quantum Liouville gravity. It has a…
Theories of gravity are fundamentally a relation between matter and the geometric structure of the underlying spacetime. So once we put some additional restrictions on the spacetime geometry, the theory of gravity is bound to get the…
We consider quantization of the Baierlein-Sharp-Wheeler form of the gravitational action, in which the lapse function is determined from the Hamiltonian constraint. This action has a square root form, analogous to the actions of the…
We formulate a non-perturbative lattice model of two-dimensional Lorentzian quantum gravity by performing the path integral over geometries with a causal structure. The model can be solved exactly at the discretized level. Its continuum…
It is rather well-known that spacetime singularities are not covariant under field redefinitions. A manifestly covariant approach to singularities in classical gravity was proposed in arXiv:2008.09387. In this paper, we start to extend this…
We review the approach to quantum gravity which is based on the assumption that the short-distance structure of the spacetime is given by a piecewise flat manifold corresponding to a triangulation of a smooth manifold. We then describe the…
Spacetime inversion symmetries such as parity and time reversal play a central role in physics, but they are usually treated as global symmetries. In quantum gravity there are no global symmetries, so any spacetime inversion symmetries must…
We present here a brief review and discussion on recent developments in the theory of spacetime singularities. After mentioning some key motivations on the main ideas and concepts involved, we take the approach that the singularities will…
We review the classical and quantum singularity structure of a broad class of spacetimes with asymptotically power-law behavior near the origin. Quantum considerations "heal" a large class of scalar curvature singularities.
The dimension of the Hilbert space of a quantum gravitational system can be written formally as a path integral partition function over Lorentzian metrics. We implement this in a 2+1 dimensional simplicial minisuperspace model in which the…
Recent developments in holographic gravity suggest that spacetime structure may be deeply related to quantum mechanics. In this work, from a different perspective, we demonstrate that wave-particle duality can be interpreted as the…
A new path integral approach of quantum gravity based on relational variables and quantum test objects is presented. We take as a basic variables the squared invariant distance. This invariant quantity is technically simpler to work with…
Starting from the space of Lorentzian metrics, we examine the full gravitational path integral in 3 and 4 space-time dimensions. Inspired by recent results obtained in a regularized, dynamically triangulated formulation of Lorentzian…
Canonical quantization of three dimensional gravity in the first order formalism suggests that one should allow singular solutions. This paper addresses the importance of singular solutions in the path integral approach to quantum gravity.…
In an attempt to re-establish space-time as an essential frame for formulating quantum gravity - rather than an "emergent" one -, we find that exact invariance under scale transformations is an essential new ingredient for such a theory.…
Evaluating gravitational path integrals in the Lorentzian has been a long-standing challenge due to the numerical sign problem. We show that this challenge can be overcome in simplicial quantum gravity. By deforming the integration contour…
We elaborate on the role of higher-derivative curvature invariants as a quantum selection mechanism of regular spacetimes in the framework of the Lorentzian path integral approach to quantum gravity. We show that for a large class of black…
General relativity successfully describes space-times at scales that we can observe and probe today, but it cannot be complete as a consequence of singularity theorems. For a long time there have been indications that quantum gravity will…
A key incentive of quantum gravity is the removal of spacetime singularities plaguing the classical theory. We compute the non-perturbative momentum-dependence of a specific structure function within the gravitational asymptotic safety…