Related papers: Spin Foam Models and the Classical Action Principl…
A lattice quantum gravity model in 4 dimensional Riemannian spacetime is constructed based on the SU(2) Ashtekar formulation of general relativity. This model can be understood as one of the family of models sometimes called ``spin foam…
From pure Yang-Mills action for the $SL(5,\mathbb{R})$ group in four Euclidean dimensions we obtain a gravity theory in the first order formalism. Besides the Einstein-Hilbert term, the effective gravity has a cosmological constant term, a…
We study perturbation theory for spin foam models on triangulated manifolds. Starting with any model of this sort, we consider an arbitrary perturbation of the vertex amplitudes, and write the evolution operators of the perturbed model as…
We generalize the de Broglie-Bohm (dBB) formulation of quantum mechanics to the case of quantum gravity (QG) by using the effective action for a QG theory. This is done by replacing the dBB equations of motion with the effective action…
A direct relation between two types of topological field theories, Chern-Simons theory and BF theory, is presented by using ``Generalized Differential Calculus'', which extends an ordinary p-form to an ordered pair of p and (p+1)-form. We…
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…
We define an effective action for spin foam models of quantum gravity by adapting the background field method from quantum field theory. We show that the Regge action is the leading term in the semi-classical expansion of the spin foam…
A surface theoretic view of non-perturbative quantum gravity as "spin-foams" was proposed by Baez. A possibility of constructing such a model was studied some time ago based on (2+1) dimensional general relativity as a reformulation of the…
The Turaev-Viro state sum model provides a covariant spin foam quantization of three-dimensional Riemannian gravity with a positive cosmological constant {\Lambda}. We complete the program to canonically quantize the theory in the BF…
Yang-Mills theory in the first order formalism appears as the deformation of a topological field theory, the pure BF theory. We discuss this formulation at the quantum level, giving the Feynman rules of the BF-YM theory, the structure of…
Starting from Plebanski formulation of gravity as a constrained BF theory we propose a new spin foam model for 4d Riemannian quantum gravity that generalises the well-known Barrett-Crane model and resolves the inherent to it ultra-locality…
The deformation of a topological field theory, namely the pure BF theory, gives the first order formulation of Yang-Mills theory; Feynman rules are given and the standard uv-behaviour is recovered. In this formulation new non local…
We construct a state in the loop quantum gravity theory with zero cosmological constant, which should correspond to the flat spacetime vacuum solution. This is done by defining the loop transform coefficients of a flat connection…
In this article, we analyze a 7-dimensional $BF$ theory that, upon dimensional reduction, transforms into an effective 4-dimensional action in which a generic metric is involved. A constraint is imposed in such a way that this is the…
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…
This article reviews the present status of the spin foam approach to the quantization of gravity. Special attention is payed to the pedagogical presentation of the recently introduced new models for four dimensional quantum gravity. The…
Spin foams of 4d gravity were recently extended from complexes with purely spacelike surfaces to complexes that also contain timelike surfaces. In this article, we express the associated partition function in terms of vertex amplitudes and…
We study a generalized action for gravity as a constrained BF theory, and its relationship with the Plebanski action. We analyse the discretization of the constraints and the spin foam quantization of the theory, showing that it leads…
Spin foams arise from a quantization of classical gravity expressed via the Plebanski action. Key open questions related to the continuum limit of spin foams are whether general relativity is reproduced and what type of corrections could…
When coupling fermions to gravity, torsion is naturally induced. We consider the possibility that fermion bilinears can act as a source for torsion, altering the dynamics of the early universe such that the big bang gets replaced with a…