Related papers: Quantum geometry of topological gravity
The central topic of this thesis is two dimensional Quantum Gravity and its properties. The term Quantum Gravity itself is ambiguous as there are many proposals for its correct formulation and none of them have been verified experimentally.…
The gauge symmetry of classical general relativity under space-time diffeomorphisms implies that any path integral quantization which can be interpreted as a sum over space-time geometries, gives rise to a formal invariant of smooth…
It is shown that conformal matter with $c_{\ssc L}\not=c_{\ssc R}$ can be consistently coupled to two-dimensional `frame' gravity. The theory is quantized, following David, and Distler and Kawai, using the derivation of their {\it ansatz}…
The phase diagram of 2d Lorentzian quantum gravity (LQG) coupled to conformal matter is studied. A phase transition is observed at $c=c_{\rm crit}$ ($1/2<c_{\rm crit}<4$) which can be thought of as the analogue of the $c=1$ barrier of…
Our goal here is to present a detailed analysis connecting the anomalous scaling properties of 2D simplicial quantum gravity to the geometry of the moduli space M_{g,N} of genus g Riemann surfaces with N punctures. In the case of pure…
The possible interpretations of a new continuum model for the two-dimensional quantum gravity for $d>1$ ($d$=matter central charge), obtained by carefully treating both diffeomorphism and Weyl symmetries, are discussed. In particular we…
We provide a non-perturbative geometrical characterization of the partition function of $n$-dimensional quantum gravity based on a coarse classification of riemannian geometries. We show that, under natural geometrical constraints, the…
We investigate the interaction between matter and causal dynamical triangulations (CDT) in the context of two-dimensional quantum gravity. We focus on the Ising model coupled to CDT, contrasting this with Liouville gravity and the relation…
We prove that for each $\gamma \in (0,2)$, there is an exponent $d_\gamma > 2$, the "fractal dimension of $\gamma$-Liouville quantum gravity (LQG)", which describes the ball volume growth exponent for certain random planar maps in the…
We discuss some problems related to dimensional reductions of gravity theories to two-dimensional and one-dimensional dilaton gravity models. We first consider the most general cylindrical reductions of the four-dimensional gravity and…
The study of general two dimensional models of gravity allows to tackle basic questions of quantum gravity, bypassing important technical complications which make the treatment in higher dimensions difficult. As the physically important…
A potentially powerful approach to quantum gravity has been developed over the last few years under the name of Causal Dynamical Triangulations. Numerical simulations have given very interesting results in the cases of two, three and four…
We consider three dimensional gravity with a positive cosmological constant and non- zero gravitational Chern-Simons term. This theory has inflating de Sitter solutions and local metric degrees of freedom. The Euclidean signature partition…
We initiate quantitative studies of complexity in (1+1)-dimensional conformal field theories with a view that they provide the simplest setting to find a gravity dual to complexity. Our work pursues a geometric understanding of complexity…
We argue that a consistent coupling of a quantum theory to gravity requires an extension of ordinary `first order' Riemannian geometry to second order Riemannian geometry, which incorporates both a line element and an area element. This…
I describe a project to open a new territory of quantum field theory where the fields live not on a space-time manifold but on certain complete metric spaces of (n-1)-dimensional objects (defects) in a 2n-dimensional space-time M. These…
We show that the ``time'' t_s defined via spin clusters in the Ising model coupled to 2d gravity leads to a fractal dimension d_h(s) = 6 of space-time at the critical point, as advocated by Ishibashi and Kawai. In the unmagnetized phase,…
We study point particles in 2+1 dimensional first order gravity using a triangulation to fix the connection and frame-field. The Hamiltonian is reduced to a boundary term which yields the total mass. The triangulation is dynamical with…
We calculate the spectral dimension for a nonperturbative lattice approach to quantum gravity, known as causal dynamical triangulations (CDT), showing that the dimension of spacetime smoothly decreases from approximately 4 on large distance…
We study a formulation of lattice gravity defined via Euclidean dynamical triangulations (EDT). After fine-tuning a non-trivial local measure term we find evidence that four-dimensional, semi-classical geometries are recovered at long…