Quantum Gravity

53110  |  Winter term 2016/17

Prof. Dr. Claus Kiefer

Thursdays, 10:00-11:30, seminar room 0.3 (new physics building)

Start: October 20, 2016


Specialized Master course within the Primary Area of Specialization GR-QFT

Contents of the lecture

Introduction to several approaches to unify gravity and quantum theory

Hartle-Hawking instanton

Exercise classes

Exercise classes are voluntary and will be of informal character.

Organization: Branislav Nikolic

Time and place: Thursdays 14:00, Konferenzraum 1 (Neubau)

Start: November 24th


Date Description Resources and remarks
December 1st Intuition behind the path integrals: double slit experiment Lecture Notes by Hitoshi Murayama (good starting point); Lecture Notes by Richard MacKenzie (another good starting point); Lecture Notes by Matthias Blau; Cornell lecture notes (nice applications to Standard Model QFT, with basics of renormalization); Feynman's original paper on path integrals;
December 8th Questions and general discussion
December 15th Crash course on constraint analysis: Hamiltonian formualtion of electrodynamics Sundermeyer, Constrained Dynamics: Ch.6
December 22nd The Constraints Zoo: primary, secondary, first class, second class; number of degrees of freedom. (Discussed on example of a massive vector field) Students are encouraged to practice (and question!) constraint analasys on these kind of simple but insightful systems. Can you think of other examples where constraints arise?
January 12nd no class
January 19th ABC before D: Issues with Dirac's view on first class constraints and gauge transformations Pitts, arXiv:1310.2756; Castellani, Symmetries in constrained Hamiltonian systems; Pons, Salisbury, Shepley, arXiv:9612037 [gr-qc]
January 26th General remarks on Wheeler-DeWitt equation and disappearance of time
February 2nd From full quantum gravity to classical world: details about semiclassical approximation(s) TBA
February 9th No class!

Literature

The book is available at C. Kiefer, Quantum Gravity, third edition (Oxford University Press)
Review article: Conceptual Problems in Quantum Gravity and Quantum Cosmology, C. Kiefer