U.S.-Italy Cooperative Research: An Approach to Nonperturbative Quantum Gravity

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This award will support Professors Abhay Ashtekar and Lee Smolin of Syracuse University in a research collaboration with Professor Carlo Rovelli of the University of Rome. The investigators plan to continue their very fruitful collaboration on one of the fundamentally important unsolved problems of physics: the quantization of general relativity. The proposed research involves further investigation of two new representations for quantum gravity: the self-dual representation and the loop space representation in which quantum states are defined by suitable functions on the space of loops on a 3-manifold. The collaborators have been at the forefront of research in quantum gravity theories and have made significant progress in the construction of the physical state space of gravitational fields. This collaboration will allow them to extend their promising search for solutions to the problems of quantum general relativity.