Title: Quantum Gravity and Curvature

Abstract: It has taken several decades of exploring statistical models of quantum gravity (aka nonperturbative gravitational path integrals) to understand how diffeomorphism-invariance, unitarity and the presence of a causal structure can be simultaneously accounted for in a lattice gravity framework. Causal Dynamical Triangulations (CDT) incorporates all of these features and provides a toolbox for extracting quantitative results from a first-principles quantum formulation, with very few free parameters. Recently, we have introduced “quantum Ricci curvature”, an observable that –somewhat remarkably–remains meaningful in a maximally nonclassical, Planckian regime. Measuring this curvature in fully-fledged 4D quantum gravity, we have discovered exciting evidence that the quantum universe dynamically generated in CDT is compatible with a constantly curved de Sitter space.

Talk – Video

Talk – Slides