Conveners
Cornering quantum gravity
- Luca Ciambelli
Cornering quantum gravity
- Luca Ciambelli
Cornering quantum gravity
- Luca Ciambelli
Cornering quantum gravity
- Luca Ciambelli
Description
These lectures aim at giving a freshen perspective on classical gravitational theories as a starting point for quantum physics. We review the covariant phase space formalism and Noether's theorems, insisting in particular on gauge symmetries. In the presence of boundaries, part of the otherwise pure gauge symmetries becomes physical. Such symmetries are called asymptotic (to the boundary) symmetries, and are the crucial ingredient of these lectures. We show how they are the underlying symmetry structure of memory effects in electromagnetism and gravity, and how they lead to the soft theorems. This allows us to enunciate the infrared triangle relating memories, symmetries, and soft theorems. We then formulate the corner proposal, which is a novel approach to quantum gravity, based again on these symmetries. We first prove how a careful understanding of embeddings provides a canonical gravitational Poisson bracket for us. Secondly, we comment on how the corner proposal helps us focussing on classical features that are more suitable for quantization. We conclude with a list of future steps to be made to shed new light on quantum gravity. To elucidate and familiarize with the important results, exercises are proposed and solved throughout the lectures.
