Related papers: Boucles et Mousses de Spin en Gravite Quantique
The evaluation of relativistic spin networks plays a fundamental role in the Barrett-Crane state sum model of Lorentzian quantum gravity in 4 dimensions. A relativistic spin network is a graph labelled by unitary irreducible representations…
In the quest of a physical theory of quantum gravity, spin foam models, or in short spinfoams, propose a well-defined path integral summing over quantized discrete space-time geometries. At the crossroad of topological quantum field theory,…
The study of toy models in loop quantum gravity (LQG), defined as truncations of the full theory, is relevant to both the development of the LQG phenomenology, in cosmology and astrophysics, and the progress towards the resolution of the…
We show how Feynman amplitudes of standard QFT on flat and homogeneous space can naturally be recast as the evaluation of observables for a specific spin foam model, which provides dynamics for the background geometry. We identify the…
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 construct a class of spin foam models describing matter coupled to gravity, such that the gravitational sector is described by the unitary irreducible representations of the appropriate symmetry group, while the matter sector is…
Spin foam vertex amplitudes are the key ingredient of spin foam models for quantum gravity. These fall into the realm of discretized path integral, and can be seen as generalized lattice gauge theories. They can be seen as an attempt at a…
We numerically study Barrett-Crane models of Riemannian quantum gravity. We have extended the existing numerical techniques to handle q-deformed models and arbitrary space-time triangulations. We present and interpret expectation values of…
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 a recent paper [1] we have constructed the spin and tensor representations of SO(4) from which the invariant weight can be derived for the Barrett-Crane model in quantum gravity. By analogy with the SO(4) group, we present the…
This thesis is devoted to the study of 3-dimensional quantum gravity as a spin foam model and group field theory. In the first part of this thesis, we review some general physical and mathematical aspects of 3-dimensional gravity, focusing…
Any approach to pure quantum gravity must eventually face the question of coupling quantum matter to the theory. In the past, several ways of coupling matter to spin foam quantum gravity have been proposed, but the dynamics of the coupled…
We present a spin foam formulation of Lorentzian quantum General Relativity. The theory is based on a simple generalization of an Euclidean model defined in terms of a field theory over a group. Its vertex amplitude turns out to be the one…
Making the Lorentzian path integral for quantum gravity well-defined and computable has been a long standing challenge. In this work we adopt the recently proposed effective spin foam models to the Lorentzian case. This defines a path…
We discuss the notion of causality in Quantum Gravity in the context of sum-over-histories approaches, in the absence therefore of any background time parameter. In the spin foam formulation of Quantum Gravity, we identify the appropriate…
We describe here some new results concerning the Lorentzian Barrett-Crane model, a well-known spin foam formulation of quantum gravity. Generalizing an existing finiteness result, we provide a concise proof of finiteness of the partition…
A number of background independent quantizations procedures have recently been employed in 4d nonperturbative quantum gravity. We investigate and illustrate these techniques and their relation in the context of a simple 2d topological…
We argue for enlarging the traditional view of quantum gravity, based on "quantizing GR", to include explicitly the non-spatiotemporal nature of the fundamental building blocks suggested by several modern quantum gravity approaches (and…
A number of approaches to four-dimensional quantum gravity, such as loop quantum gravity and holography, situate areas as their fundamental variables. However, this choice of kinematics can easily lead to gravitational dynamics peaked on…
An example illustrating a continuum spin foam framework is presented. This covariant framework induces the kinematics of canonical loop quantization, and its dynamics is generated by a {\em renormalized} sum over colored polyhedra.…