Related papers: Spacetime as a Feynman diagram: the connection for…
So far spin foam models are hardly understood beyond a few of their basic building blocks. To make progress on this question, we define analogue spin foam models, so called spin nets, for quantum groups $\text{SU}(2)_k$ and examine their…
We study the coupling of massive fermions to the quantum mechanical dynamics of spacetime emerging from the spinfoam approach in three dimensions. We first recall the classical theory before constructing a spinfoam model of quantum gravity…
We present here the first lattice simulation of symplectic quantization, a new functional approach to quantum field theory which allows to define an algorithm to numerically sample the quantum fluctuations of fields directly in Minkowski…
We present an alternative formalism for modeling spin. The ontological elements of this formalism are base-2 sequences of length $n$. The machinery necessary to model physics is then developed by considering correlations between base-2…
We present a new description of discrete space-time in 1+1 dimensions in terms of a set of elementary geometrical units that represent its independent classical degrees of freedom. This is achieved by means of a binary encoding that is…
We study perturbation theory for spin foam models on triangulated manifolds. Starting with any model of this sort, we consider an arbitrary perturbation of the vertex amplitudes, and write the evolution operators of the perturbed model as…
We introduce a class of 2D lattice models that describe the dynamics of intertwiners, or, in a condensed matter interpretation, the fusion and splitting of anyons. We identify different families and instances of triangulation invariant,…
Spin foam models for gravity or BF theory can be constructed by path integral formulation of the classical discrete models formulated on simplicial manifolds. Using this, we discuss the rigorous construction of Lorentzian spin foam models…
We showed that the principle of nongravitating vacuum energy, when formulated in the first order formalism, solves the cosmological constant problem. The most appealing formulation of the theory displays a local symmetry associated with the…
Gravity, and the puzzle regarding its energy, can be understood from a gauge theory perspective. Gravity, i.e., dynamical spacetime geometry, can be considered as a local gauge theory of the symmetry group of Minkowski spacetime: the…
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 the context of spin foam models for quantum gravity, group field theories are a useful tool allowing on the one hand a non-perturbative formulation of the partition function and on the other hand admitting an interpretation as…
We present a new completely elementary model that describes the creation, annihilation, and motion of non-interacting electrons and positrons along a line. It is a modification of the model known under the names Feynman checkers or…
This is a nontechnical introduction to recent work on quantum gravity using ideas from higher-dimensional algebra. We argue that reconciling general relativity with the Standard Model requires a `background-free quantum theory with local…
We investigate a formulation of continuum 4d gravity in terms of a constrained topological (BF) theory, in the spirit of the Plebanski formulation, but involving only linear constraints, of the type used recently in the spin foam approach…
We examine the Kogut-Susskind formulation of lattice gauge theories under the light of fermionic and bosonic degrees of freedom that provide a description useful to the development of quantum simulators of gauge invariant models. We…
We present an interpretation of loop quantization in the framework of lattice gauge theory. Within this context the lack of appropriate notions of effective theories and renormalization group flow exhibit loop quantization as an incomplete…
The Spin Foam approach to quantum gravity aims at providing a covariant path-integral formulation of canonical Loop Quantum Gravity. Since spin foam amplitudes are defined through discretisations of spacetime, understanding the continuum…
We construct a generalization of pure lattice gauge theory (LGT) where the role of the gauge group is played by a tensor category. The type of tensor category admissible (spherical, ribbon, symmetric) depends on the dimension of the…
Group field theories whose Feynman diagrams describe 3d gravity with a varying configuration of Wilson loop observables and 3d gravity with volume observables at each vertex are defined. The volume observables are created by the usual spin…