Informal Discussion with interested students
Thursday, July 11, 11:00
KOSMA-Room (meeting in foyer)
Talk in Theory Colloquium
Friday, July 12, 16:30
Seminar room ETP
Spin foam quantum gravity is a non-perturbative, background independent approach to quantizing gravity. It formulates a path integral as a sum over quantum geometries encoded in group theoretic data as in loop quantum gravity; thus it is frequently seen as a way of defining a covariant dynamics for this theory. In this talk, Sebastian Steinhaus from Jena wants to motivate quantum gravity as a manifestly background independent theory and define the gravitational path integral à la spin foams. As a regularisation, he introduces a triangulation and discuss how gravity can be formulated in the discrete, via Regge calculus in a piece-wise flat way. Then he discusses how quantum geometry is encoded in a spin foam and how it connects to Regge calculus in a putative semi-classical limit. He will review outstanding research challenges, in particular for the Lorentzian theory, and discuss concretely the construction of a cosmological model coupled to a scalar field.