Quantum Gravity

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

Introduction to several approaches to unify gravity and quantum theory

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!