Related papers: New Developments in the Spectral Asymptotics of Qu…
In this article, we study the no-boundary wave function in scalar-tensor gravity with various potentials for the non-minimally coupled scalar field. Our goal is to calculate probabilities for the scalar field - and hence the effective…
When the semi-positive cosmological constant is dynamical, the naive Euclidean Einstein action is unbounded from below and the Hartle-Hawking wavefunction of the universe is not normalizable. With the inclusion of back-reaction (a crucial…
We study the quantum dynamics of a supersymmetric squashed three-sphere by dimensionally reducing to one timelike dimension the action of D=4 simple supergravity for a Bianchi IX cosmological model. After imposition of the diffeomorphism…
Boundary conditions play a crucial role in the path-integral approach to quantum gravity and quantum cosmology, as well as in the current attempts to understand the one-loop semiclassical properties of quantum field theories. Within this…
It is shown that the cosmological singularity in isotropic minisuperspaces is naturally removed by quantum geometry. Already at the kinematical level, this is indicated by the fact that the inverse scale factor is represented by a bounded…
This paper reviews the progress made over the last five years in studying boundary conditions and semiclassical properties of quantum fields about 4-real-dimensional Riemannian backgrounds. For massless spin-${1\over 2}$ fields one has a…
Physical properties of the quantum gravitational vacuum state are explored by solving a lattice version of the Wheeler-DeWitt equation. The constraint of diffeomorphism invariance is strong enough to uniquely determine the structure of the…
Recent work in the literature has studied a new set of local boundary conditions for the quantized gravitational field, where the spatial components of metric perturbations, and ghost modes, are subject to Robin boundary conditions, whereas…
This paper describes recent progress in the analysis of relativistic gauge conditions for Euclidean Maxwell theory in the presence of boundaries. The corresponding quantum amplitudes are studied by using Faddeev-Popov formalism and…
Within the background field formalism of quantum gravity, I show that if the quantum fluctuations are limited to diffeomorphic gauge transformations rather than the physical degrees of freedom, as in conventional quantum field theory, all…
A gauge-averaging functional of the axial type is studied for simple supergravity at one loop about flat Euclidean four-space bounded by a three-sphere, or two concentric three-spheres. This is a generalization of recent work on the axial…
An alternative formulation of the no-boundary initial state of the universe in the Euclidean quantum theory of gravity is proposed. Unlike the no-boundary Hartle-Hawking wave function, in which time appears together with macroscopic…
We examine Bousso's covariant entropy bound conjecture in the context of radiation filled, spatially flat, Friedmann-Robertson-Walker models. The bound is violated near the big bang. However, the hope has been that quantum gravity effects…
This paper studies the one-loop expansion of the amplitudes of electromagnetism about flat Euclidean backgrounds bounded by a 3-sphere, recently considered in perturbative quantum cosmology, by using zeta-function regularization. For a…
The Lorentzian Hamiltonian constraint is solved for isotropic loop quantum cosmology coupled to a massless scalar field. As in the Euclidean case, the discreteness of quantum geometry removes the classical singularity from the quantum…
Recent computations of scattering amplitudes show that N=8 supergravity is surprisingly well behaved in the ultraviolet and may even be ultraviolet finite in perturbation theory. The novel cancellations necessary for ultraviolet finiteness…
A discrete class of privileged reference frames in a closed universe with identical equations of motion for physical degrees of freedom was found. A representation of the quantum state of the universe in a privileged reference frame was…
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…
We perform the manifestly covariant quantization of a scale invariant gravity with a scalar field, which is equivalent to the well-known Brans-Dicke gravity via a field redefinition of the scalar field, in the de Donder gauge condition (or…
Loop quantum gravity introduces strong non-perturbative modifications to the dynamical equations in the semi-classical regime, which are responsible for various novel effects, including resolution of the classical singularity in a Friedman…