Choose timezone
Your profile timezone:
Description
Quantum gravity remains one of the great open problems in theoretical physics. A convincing, background independent and fully general relativistic quantum field theory, capable of describing quantum space-time is still lacking. I briefly review successes and
difficulties of the major current approaches to the problem (strings, loops, non-commutative geometry, etc.), and then focus on the loop approach. I illustrate the basics of loop quantum gravity, the picture of quantum space-time it provides, and its main physical successes: the computation of the Planck scale spectra of area and volume, and of the Bekenstein-Hawking black hole entropy. I then describe recent developments in the covariant formulation of loop quantum gravity: the spin foam formulation; and a surprising convergence between the loop
formalism and topological quantum field theory.