Related papers: Spinfoams: Foundations
Spinfoam theories are hoped to provide the dynamics of non-perturbative loop quantum gravity. But a number of their features remain elusive. The best studied one -the euclidean Barrett-Crane model- does not have the boundary state space…
This is a review of the present status of loop and spin foam approaches to quantization of four-dimensional general relativity. It aims at raising various issues which seem to challenge some of the methods and the results often taken as…
Spin foams provide path integrals for quantum gravity, which employ discretizations as regulator. To obtain regulator independent predictions, we must remove these fiducial structures in a suitable refinement limit. In this chapter we…
Loop quantum gravity is an approach to quantum gravity that starts from the Hamiltonian formulation in terms of a connection and its canonical conjugate. Quantization proceeds in the spirit of Dirac: First one defines an algebra of basic…
In the last 20 years, loop quantum gravity, a background independent approach to unify general relativity and quantum mechanics, has been widely investigated. The aim of loop quantum gravity is to construct a mathematically rigorous,…
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…
Shape Dynamics is a gauge theory based on spatial diffeomorphism- and Weyl-invariance which is locally indistinguishable form classical General Relativity. If taken seriously, it suggests that the spacetime--geometry picture that underlies…
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…
Spin foams arose as the covariant (path integral) formulation of quantum gravity depicting transition amplitudes between different quantum geometry states. As such, they provide a scheme to study the no boundary proposal, specifically the…
We explore how to extract effective dynamics from loop quantum gravity and spinfoams truncated to a finite fixed graph, with the hope of modeling symmetry-reduced gravitational systems. We particularize our study to the 2-vertex graph with…
The problem of finding the quantum theory of the gravitational field, and thus understanding what is quantum spacetime, is still open. One of the most active of the current approaches is loop quantum gravity. Loop quantum gravity is a…
In 4 dimensions, general relativity can be formulated as a constrained $BF$ theory; we show that the same is true in 2 dimensions. We describe a spinfoam quantization of this constrained BF-formulation of 2d riemannian general relativity,…
In this paper, we study the discrete classical phase space of loop gravity, which is expressed in terms of the holonomy-flux variables, and show how it is related to the continuous phase space of general relativity. In particular, we prove…
Spin foam models are an approach to quantum gravity based on the concept of sum over states, which aims to describe quantum spacetime dynamics in a way that its parent framework, loop quantum gravity, has not as of yet succeeded. Since…
Loop quantum gravity envisions a small scale structure of spacetime that is markedly different from that of the classical spacetime continuum. This has ramifications for the excitation of matter fields and for their coupling to gravity.…
The canonical ``loop'' formulation of quantum gravity is a mathematically well defined, background independent, non perturbative standard quantization of Einstein's theory of General Relativity. Some among the most meaningful results of the…
Based on a recent purely geometric construction of observables for the spatial diffeomorphism constraint, we propose two distinct quantum reductions to spherical symmetry within full 3+1-dimensional loop quantum gravity. The construction of…
Current theories of particle physics, including the standard model, are dominated by the paradigm that nature is basically translation invariant. Deviations from translation invariance are described by the action of forces. General…
Spin Foam and Loop approaches to Quantum Gravity reformulate Einstein's theory of relativity in terms of connection variables. The metric properties are encoded in face bivectors/conjugate fluxes that are required to satisfy certain…
We construct the operator that projects on the physical states in loop quantum gravity. To this aim, we consider a diffeomorphism invariant functional integral over scalar functions. The construction defines a covariant, Feynman-like,…