Related papers: General relativity histories theory II: Invariance…
General covariance is a crucial notion in the study of field theories in curved spacetime. A field theory defined with respect to a semi-Riemannian metric is generally covariant if two metrics which are related by a diffeomorphism produce…
The recently introduced manifestly covariant canonical quantization scheme is applied to gravity. New diffeomorphism anomalies generating a multi-dimensional generalization of the Virasoro algebra arise. This does not contradict theorems…
We present an overview on relational observables in gravity mainly from a loop quantum gravity perspective. The gauge group of general relativity is the diffeomorphism group of the underlying manifold. Consequently, general relativity is a…
Canonical quantization of gravitational systems is obstructed by the problem of time. Due to diffeomorphism symmetry the Hamiltonian vanishes: dynamics with respect to a background time parameter appears "frozen." Two strategies towards the…
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…
The problem of observables in classical and quantum gravity is a long-standing one. It is sometimes argued that observable quantities should be diffeomorphsm invariant, following the philosophy of Dirac. We argue that diffeomorphism…
Dirac operators on curved space-times are introduced with the help of a new point-view that observers have to be included in the formulation of natural laws. The class of Dirac operators are Lorentz invariant in the sense that the…
We investigate the canonical quantization of gravity coupled to pointlike matter in 2+1 dimensions. Starting from the usual point particle action in the first order formalism, we introduce auxiliary variables which make the action locally…
We establish a correspondence between general relativity with diffeomorphism invariance and scalar field theories with Galilean invariance: notions such as the Levi-Civita connection and the Riemann tensor have a Galilean counterpart. This…
The quantum analogue of general relativistic geometry should be implementable on smooth manifolds without an a priori metric structure, the kinematical covariance group acting by diffeomorphisms. Here I approach quantum gravity (QG) in the…
When formulated in terms of connection and coframes, and in the time gauge, the phase space of general relativity consists of a pair of conjugate fields: the flux 2-form and the Ashtekar connection. On this phase-space, one has to impose…
The construction of Dirac observables, that is gauge invariant objects, in General Relativity is technically more complicated than in other gauge theories such as the standard model due to its more complicated gauge group which is closely…
We consider the role of the diffeomorphism constraint in the quantization of lattice formulations of diffeomorphism invariant theories of connections. It has been argued that in working with abstract lattices, one automatically takes care…
The configuration space of general relativity is superspace - the space of all Riemannian 3-metrics modulo diffeomorphisms. However, it has been argued that the configuration space for gravity should be conformal superspace - the space of…
We discuss reality conditions and the relation between spacetime diffeomorphisms and gauge transformations in Ashtekar's complex formulation of general relativity. We produce a general theoretical framework for the stabilization algorithm…
The standard geometrodynamics is transformed into a theory of conformal geometrodynamics by extending the ADM phase space for canonical general relativity to that consisting of York's mean exterior curvature time, conformal three-metric and…
This note is to bring to the reader's attention the fact that general relativity and quantum mechanics differ from each other in one main aspect. General relativity is based on the diffeomorphism covariant formulation of the laws of physics…
It has long been recognized that lattice gauge theory formulations, when applied to general relativity, conflict with the invariance of the theory under diffeomorphisms. Additionally, the traditional lattice field theory approach consists…
Based on a family of indefinite unitary representations of the diffeomorphism group of an oriented smooth $4$-manifold, a manifestly covariant $4$ dimensional and non-perturbative algebraic quantum field theory formulation of gravity is…
The Hamiltonian formulation of general relativity (GR) is considered in finite space-time and a specific frame of reference given by the diffeo-invariant components of the Fock simplex in terms of the Dirac -- ADM variables. The evolution…