Related papers: Quantum Gravity
When gravity is sourced by a quantum system, there is tension between its role as the mediator of a fundamental interaction, which is expected to acquire nonclassical features, and its role in determining the properties of spacetime, which…
We argue that the conventional quantum field theory in curved spacetime has a grave drawback: The canonical commutation relations for quantum fields and conjugate momenta do not hold. Thus the conventional theory should be denounced and the…
Quantum geometry is a key quantity that distinguishes electrons in a crystal from those in the vacuum. Its study continues to provide insights into quantum materials, uncovering new design principles for their discovery. However, unlike the…
One of the major issues confronting theoretical physics is finding a quantum theory of gravity and a resolution to the cosmological constant problem. It is believed that a true quantum theory of gravity will lead to a solution to the this…
Quantum information can provide a lens for characterizing the operational implications of spacetime physics. A well-known result in this area is that quantum entanglement is degraded in the vicinity of a black hole. This result treats the…
We show that a partially massless graviton can propagate on a large set of spacetimes which are not Einstein spacetimes. Starting from a recently constructed theory for a massive graviton that propagates the correct number of degrees of…
It is argued that quantum gravity has an interpretation as a topological field theory provided a certain constraint from the path intergral measure is respected. The constraint forces us to couple gauge and matter fields to gravity for…
Coupling any interacting quantum mechanical system to gravity in one (time) dimension requires the cosmological constant to belong to the matter energy spectrum and thus to be quantised, even though the gravity sector is free of any quantum…
Quantum inequalities bound the extent to which weighted time averages of the renormalized energy density of a quantum field can be negative. They have mostly been proved in flat spacetime, but we need curved-spacetime inequalities to…
Research in quantum gravity strongly suggests that our world in not fundamentally spatiotemporal, but that spacetime may only emerge in some sense from a non-spatiotemporal structure, as this paper illustrates in the case of causal set…
We propose that at the beginning of the universe gravity existed in a limbo either because it was switched off or because it was only conformally coupled to all particles. This picture can be reverse-engineered from the requirement that the…
The search for a quantum theory of gravity has been one of the main aims of theoretical physics for many years by now. However the efforts in this direction have been often hampered by the lack of experimental/observational tests able to…
Curvature is a key notion in General Relativity, characterizing the local physical properties of spacetime. By contrast, the concept of curvature has received scant attention in nonperturbative quantum gravity. One may even wonder whether…
The cosmological constant problem is principally concerned with trying to understand how the zero-point energy of quantum fields contributes to gravity. Here we take the approach that by addressing a fundamental unresolved issue in quantum…
Gravity and matter are universally coupled, and this unique universality provides us with an intriguing way to quantifying quantum aspects of space-time in terms of the number of gravitons within a given box. In particular, we will provide…
We argue that theories of quantum gravity constructed with the help of (Causal) Dynamical Triangulations have given us the most informative, quantitative models to date of quantum spacetime. Most importantly, these are derived dynamically…
Quantum matter in quantum space-time is discussed using general properties of energy-conservation laws. As a rather radical conclusion, it is found that standard methods of differential geometry and quantum field theory on curved space-time…
As it stands, quantum gravity coupled with matter in three spacetime dimensions is not finite. In this paper I show that an algorithmic procedure that makes it finite exists, under certain conditions. To achieve this result, gravity is…
Theories of quantum gravity generically presuppose or predict that the reality underlying relativistic spacetimes they are describing is significantly non-spatiotemporal. On pain of empirical incoherence, approaches to quantum gravity must…
The gravitational interaction, as described by the Einstein-Cartan theory, is shown to emerge as the by-product of the spontaneous symmetry breaking of a gauge symmetry in a pre-geometric four-dimensional spacetime. Starting from a…