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BV-BFV approach to General Relativity

Mathematical Physics Seminar

Speaker: Michele Schiavina, ETH Zurich
Location: 3024 PSEL/QMAP
Start time: Fri, Dec 3 2021, 11:00AM

The BV-BFV formalism is a combination of the BV approach to quantisation of Lagrangian field theories with local symmetries and the BFV approach to quantisation of constrained Hamiltonian systems. It aims to assign compatible bulk-boundary cohomological data to a Lagrangian field theory on a manifold with boundary (and higher codimension strata), in view of a perturbative quantisation scheme that is compatible with cutting and gluing. General Relativity (GR), seen as a field theory, is a very important example to phrase within this setting, and one in which interesting new insight and complications emerge already at the classical level.

In this talk I will present a summary of investigations on GR within the BV-BFV formalism, as well as other diffeomorphism-invariant theories, which have given access to rich and nontrivial information about the boundary structure of gravitational models. I will argue that the featured examples present unexpected insight for the program of quantisation with boundary (and higher strata).



https://ucdavis.zoom.us/j/97045436855