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

该奖项将支持锡拉丘兹大学的Abhay Ashtekar教授和Lee Smolin教授与罗马大学的Carlo Rovelli教授进行研究合作。研究人员计划继续在物理学中一个根本重要的悬而未决的问题上进行卓有成效的合作：广义相对论的量子化。所提出的研究包括进一步研究量子引力的两种新的表示：自对偶表示和圈空间表示，其中量子态由3-流形上的圈空间上的适当函数定义。合作者一直站在量子引力理论研究的前沿，并在构建引力场的物理态空间方面取得了重大进展。这一合作将使他们能够扩展他们对量子广义相对论问题的解决方案的有前途的探索。

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.