2025-10-06 - 2025-10-10
Kristina Giesel
University of Erlangen-Nuremberg
The lecture covers an introduction to the canonical formulation of Loop Quantum Gravity (LQG), which is one of the candidates for a theory of quantum gravity. The lecture begins with the Hamiltonian formulation of general relativity (GR) in terms of Ashtekar-Barbero variables as the classical starting point for LQG and then discusses methods for the canonical quantisation of constrained systems, of which GR is a prominent example.
Next, the background-independent and non-perturbative quantisation used in LQG is introduced and the differences to the Fock quantisation used in the Standard Model of particle physics are presented. The dynamics of LQG is encoded in the resulting Quantum Einstein Equations, which are the quantum analogue of the classical Einstein equations and their formulation and properties are discussed in the lecture. Finally, examples of geometric operators in LQG as well as applications in the context of quantum cosmology are presented.
