Quantum Gravity

Quantizing 4D geometries leads to discrete area spectra. Such discrete area spectra are also suggested by the holographic principle and entropy counting for black holes.

 Starting with this input of a discrete area spectrum I will construct a path integral for quantum gravity and discuss (quantum) corrections to the GR dynamics that are forced by the discrete area spectra. The resulting model can serve as effective model for the spin foam approach and clarifies  the dynamical principles and underlying key assumptions for spin foams. The considerations also point towards key phenomenological differences to e.g. the ADM quantization scheme, and thus to a way to falsify the key assumption of discrete area spectra. 

In order to solve the problem of time in quantum gravity, various approaches to a relational quantum dynamics have been proposed. In this talk, I will exploit quantum reduction maps to illustrate a previously unknown equivalence between three of the well-known ones: (1) relational observables in the clock-neutral picture of Dirac quantization, (2) Page and Wootters’ (PW) Schrödinger picture formalism, and (3) the relational Heisenberg picture obtained via symmetry reduction. Constituting three faces of the same dynamics, we call this equivalence the trinity. To establish the equivalence, a quantization procedure for relational Dirac observables is developed using covariant POVMs which encompass non-ideal clocks. The quantum reduction maps reveal this procedure as the quantum analog of the classical method of gauge-invariantly extending gauge-fixed quantities. The quantum reduction maps also allow one to extend a recent ‘clock-neutral’ approach to changing temporal reference frames, transforming relational observables and states between different clock choices, and demonstrate a clock dependent temporal nonlocality effect. Using the trinity, I will discuss how Kuchar's three fundamental criticisms against the PW formalism, namely that its conditional probabilities would (i) yield the wrong localization probabilities for relativistic particles, (ii) violate the constraints, and (iii) produce incorrect transition probabilities, can be resolved. Given the trinity, these resolutions also apply to approaches (1) and (3) and corroborate the PW formalism, if done correctly, as a viable approach to the problem of time. Time permitting, I will explain, however, why the slogan `time from entanglement' in the PW formalism is misleading.

In this talk, we present a new outlook on canonical quantum gravity and its coupling to matter.

We will show how this fresh perspective combines the critical elements of holography, loop quantum gravity, and relative locality. I will first focus on the consequences of cutting open a portion of space and show that new symmetry charges and new degrees of freedom reveal themselves. 
I will explain the nature of this boundary symmetry algebra in metric gravity and then first-order gravity. We will see that a rich structure appears that explains from the continuum perspective the non-commutativity of geometric flux, the quantization of the area spectra, the nature of the simplicity constraints but also reveals the dual momentum observables and finally allow to reconcile the elements of canonical gravity with Lorentz invariance.
I will discuss the issue of quantization as a challenge of finding a representation of the boundary algebra and will give clues about where we are in this process.

In this talk I will discuss some recent results on boundary degrees of freedom (or edge modes), and their description via an extended phase space structure containing extra boundary fields. Motivated by a slight modification of the covariant phase space formalism, I will show how the use of a boundary Lagrangian enables to include the edge modes in the phase space and to obtain their boundary dynamics. This will be illustrated on the example of Maxwell theory, where in addition the edge modes can be understood as contributing to entanglement entropy. The possible extension of this result to gravity will then be mentioned.

Our earlier findings indicate the violation of the 'volume simplicity' constraint in the current Spinfoam models (EPRL-FK-KKL). This result, and related problems in LQG, promted to revisit the metric/vielbein degrees of freedom in the classical Einstein-Cartan gravity. Notably, I address in detail what constitutes a 'geometry' and its 'group of motions' in such Poincare gauge theory. In a differential geometric scheme that I put forward the local translations are not broken but exact, and their relation to diffeomorphism transformations is clarified. The refined notion of a tensor takes into account the (relative) localization in spacetime, whereas the key concept of 'development' generalizes parallel transport (of vectors and points) to affine spaces. I advocate for this Cartan connection as the fundamental d.o.f. of the gravitational field, and discuss implications for discretization and quantization. Based on [1905.06931].

In this talk, I will describe the framework of large D matrix models, which provides new limits for matrix models where the sum over planar graphs simplifies when D is large. The basic degrees of freedom are a set of D real matrices of size NxN which is invariant under O(D). These matrices can be naturally interpreted as a real tensor of rank three, making a compelling connection with tensor models. Furthermore, they have a natural interpretation in terms of D-brane constructions in string theory. I will present a way to define a large D scaling of the coupling constants such that the sum over Feynman graphs of fixed genus in matrix models admits a well-defined large D expansion. In particular, in the large D limit, the sum over planar graphs truncates to a tractable, yet non-trivial, sum over generalized melonic graphs. This family of graphs has been shown to display very interesting properties, especially in the case of quantum mechanical models such as the SYK model and SYK-like tensor models. If time allows, I will also explain how one can use the large D limit of matrix models to simplify the sum over all genera, which is notoriously divergent. 

According to the Asymptotic Safety conjecture, a (non-perturbatively)
renormalizable quantum field theory of gravity could be constructed
based on the existence of a non-trivial fixed point of the
renormalization group flow.
The existence of this fixed point can be established, e.g., via the
non-perturbative methods of the functional renormalization group (FRG).
In practice, the use of the FRG methods requires to work within
truncations of the gravitational action, and higher-derivative operators
naturally lead to the presence of several poles in the propagator. The
question is whether these poles represent a real problem for the
unitarity of the theory.

Using QED as a working example, in this talk I will discuss some aspects
of non-perturbative unitarity in Quantum Field Theory. I will show that
the inclusion of quantum effects at all scales is of crucial importance
to assess unitarity of field theories. In particular, poles appearing in
truncations of the action could correspond to fake degrees of freedom of
the theory. Possible conditions to determine, within truncations,
whether a pole represents a fake or a genuine degree of freedom of the
theory will also be discussed.

Hopf algebra lattice models are related to certain topological quantum field theories and give rise to topological invariants of oriented surfaces. Examples are the combinatorial quantisation of Chern-Simons theory and the Kitaev model.
Our main result is the construction of a mapping class group action on these models, formulated under weaker assumptions than the associated topological quantum field theories, namely for pivotal Hopf algebras in symmetric monoidal categories. This description also yields new structures for semisimple finite-dimensional Hopf algebras. The action of the mapping class group is defined in terms of simple graph transformations and allows one to compute quantum Dehn twists explicitly.

In approaches to quantum gravity, where smooth spacetime is an emergent approximation of a discrete Planckian fundamental structure, any standard effective field theoretical description will miss part of the degrees of freedom and thus break unitarity. Here we show that these expectations can be made precise in loop quantum cosmology. Concretely, even when loop quantum cosmology is unitary at the fundamental level, when microscopic degrees of freedom, irrelevant to low-energy cosmological observers, are suitably ignored, pure states in the effective description evolve into mixed states due to decoherence with the Planckian microscopic structure. When extrapolated to black hole formation and evaporation, this concrete example provides a key physical insight for a natural resolution of Hawking's information paradox.

Cosmological perturbation theory has a long tradition for describing the early phases of the Universe. As the observations of the CMB radiation suggest, it is reasonable, at least as a first approximation, to implement cosmological inhomogeneities as small perturbations around homogeneous and isotropic FRW solutions. In these approaches, backreactions between the inhomogeneities and the background are usually neglected. There is an ongoing debate about how and to which extend these backreactions affect the large scale structure of the Universe. Even at a purely classical level, there is no conclusive answer to this question yet.

In my talk, I am going to present a new systematic formalism for implementing backreactions in cosmological perturbation theory, in which both, the perturbations and the homogeneous degrees of freedom are considered as quantum degrees of freedom. As a more realistic theory of quantum fields on quantum cosmological space times, it can help to close the gap between a full theory of quantum gravity and symmetry-reduced models of quantum cosmology, and to confront these theories with observations. Our results show that quantum backreactions imply non-trivial corrections that are potentially phenomenologically significant.