Canonical quantum gravity with new variables and loops: a report

This is a brief and updated summary of a talk given at the International Conference on Gravitation and Cosmology that took place in Poona in December 1995. It is very brief and is mostly intended as a guide to current literature, or to keep people updated only in very broad terms on the latest developments in the subject.Comment: 7 pages, RevTeX, 3 figures included with psfi

Knot theory and quantum gravity in loop space: a primer

These notes summarize the lectures delivered in the V Mexican School of Particle Physics, at the University of Guanajuato. We give a survey of the application of Ashtekar's variables to the quantization of General Relativity in four dimensions with special emphasis on the application of techniques of analytic knot theory to the loop representation. We discuss the role that the Jones Polynomial plays as a generator of nondegenerate quantum states of the gravitational field.Comment: 44 pages. v2: figures added, also available as PDF at http://www.phys.psu.edu/~pullin/primerfigs.pd

The ADM papers and part of their modern legacy: loop quantum gravity

We present a summary for non-specialists of loop quantum gravity as part of the modern legacy of the series of papers by Arnowitt, Deser and Misner circa 1960.Comment: 7 pages, prepared for Classical and Quantum Gravity for its "Milestones of General Relativity" focus issue to be published during the Centenary Year of G

Matters of Gravity, the newsletter of the APS Topical Group on Gravitation

News: TGG session in the April meeting, by Cliff Will NRC report, by Beverly Berger MG9 Travel Grant for US researchers, by Jim Isenberg Research Briefs: How many coalescing binaries are there?, by Vicky Kalogera Recent developments in black critical phenomena, by Pat Brady Optical black holes?, by Matt Visser ``Branification:'' an alternative to compactification, by Steve Giddings Searches for non-Newtonian Gravity at Sub-mm Distances, by Riley Newman Quiescent cosmological singularities by Bernd Schmidt The debut of LIGO II, by David Shoemaker Is the universe still accelerating?, by Sean Carroll Conference reports: Journ\' ees Relativistes Weimar 1999, by Volker Perlick The 9th Midwest Relativity Meeting, by Thomas BaumgarteComment: 35 pages, LaTeX with psfig and html.sty, ISSN 1527-3431, Jorge Pullin (editor), html, ps and pdf versions at http://gravity.phys.psu.edu/mog.htm

Canonical quantization of general relativity: the last 18 years in a nutshell

This is a summary of the lectures presented at the Xth Brazilian school on cosmology and gravitation. The style of the text is that of a lightly written descriptive summary of ideas with almost no formulas, with pointers to the literature. We hope this style can encourage new people to take a look into these results. We discuss the variables that Ashtekar introduced 18 years ago that gave rise to new momentum in this field, the loop representation, spin networks, measures in the space of connections modulo gauge transformations, the Hamiltonian constraint, application to cosmology and the connection with potentially observable effects in gamma-ray bursts and conclude with a discussion of consistent discretizations of general relativity on the lattice.Comment: 13 pages, RevTeX, one figures, to appear in Proceedings of the Xth Brazilian School on Cosmology and Gravitation, Mario Novello, edito

An overview of canonical quantum gravity

This is a summary of a talk delivered at the workshop ``Quantum gravity in the Southern Cone II''. We present a very brief review of current results on canonical quantization of general relativity using Ashtekar's variables and loop quantization.Comment: 6 pages, RevTeX, no figure