Related papers: On touching random surfaces, two-dimensional quant…
The interaction of a cosmic string with a four-dimensional stationary black hole is considered. If a part of an infinitely long string passes close to a black hole it can be captured. The final stationary configurations of such captured…
The interaction of a cosmic string with a four-dimensional stationary black hole is considered. If a part of an infinitely long string passes close to a black hole it can be captured. The final stationary configurations of such captured…
Beginning with a review of the arguments leading to the so-called c=1 barrier in the continuum formulation of noncritical string theory, the pathology is then exhibited in a discretized version of the theory, formulated through dynamical…
The well known N=2 string theory describes self-dual gravity, as was shown by Ooguri and Vafa sometime ago. In search of a variant of this theory which would describe self-dual supergravity in 2+2 dimensions, we have constructed two new N=2…
We consider strings with the Nambu action as extremal surfaces in a given space-time, thus, we ignore their back reaction. Especially, we look for strings sharing one symmetry with the underlying space-time. If this is a non-null symmetry,…
Dynamical triangulations of four-dimensional Euclidean quantum gravity give rise to an interesting, numerically accessible model of quantum gravity. We give a simple introduction to the model and discuss two particularly important issues.…
Causal Dynamical Triangulations in four dimensions provide a background-independent definition of the sum over geometries in nonperturbative quantum gravity, with a positive cosmological constant. We present evidence that a macroscopic…
The main principles of two-dimensional quantum field theories, in particular two-dimensional QCD and gravity are reviewed. We study non-perturbative aspects of these theories which make them particularly valuable for testing ideas of…
Phenomenological models aiming to join gravity and quantum mechanics often predict effects that are potentially measurable in refined low-energy experiments. For instance, modified commutation relations between position and momentum, that…
We study a new two-dimensional quantum gravity theory, based on a gravitational action containing both the familiar Liouville term and the Mabuchi functional, which has been shown to be related to the coupling of non-conformal matter to…
This paper examines two cosmological models of quantum gravity (from string theory and loop quantum gravity) to investigate the foundational and conceptual issues arising from quantum treatments of the big bang. While the classical…
A quantum equivalence principle is formulated by means of a gravitational phase operator which is an element of the Poincare group. This is applied to the spinning cosmic string which suggests that it may (but not necessarily) contain…
I suggest the possibility that holographic quantum gravity is, in some sense, equivalent to quantum information theory. Some radical implications would follow. First, the theory of quantum gravity should have no adjustable coupling…
We look at the various aspects of treating general relativity as a quantum theory. It is briefly studied how to consistently quantize general relativity as an effective field theory. A key achievement here is the long-range low-energy…
Quantum gravity places entirely new challenges on the formulation of a consistent theory as well as on an extraction of potentially observable effects. Quantum corrections due to the gravitational field are commonly expected to be tiny…
An important task faced by all approaches of quantum gravity is to incorporate superpositions and quantify quantum uncertainties of spacetime causal relations. We address this task in 2D. By identifying a global $Z_2$ symmetry of 1+1D…
The aim of these lectures is to give an introduction to several topics which lie at the intersection of string theory, gravity theory and gravity phenomenology. One successively reviews: (i) the "membrane" approach to the dissipative…
It is natural to ask whether non-commutative geometry plays a role in four dimensional physics. By performing explicit computations in various toy models, we show that quantum effects lead to violations of Lorentz invariance at the level of…
We study the behaviour of a non-relativistic quantum particle interacting with different potentials, in the background spacetime generated by a cosmic string. We find the energy spectra for the quantum systems under consideration and…
Exactly soluble models can serve as excellent tools to explore conceptual issues in non-perturbative quantum gravity. In perturbative approaches, it is only the two radiative modes of the linearized gravitational field that are quantized.…