Bianca Dittrich is faculty researcher at Perimeter Institute, previously she has been at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics and at Utrecht University.

The main lesson taught by Einstein’s theory of gravity is that the gravitational field has a geometrical nature, while that of quantum theory is that fields are quantized and come with fundamental excitations. This suggest a realization of quantum gravity in terms of quantum geometry.

In loop quantum gravity, this idea is realized explicitly, and observables encoding the intrinsic and extrinsic data of a spatial geometry are represented as quantum operators on a Hilbert space. This allows to discuss rigorously the quantum properties of geometrical operators measuring the area or Continue reading →