VOTE for the best QG paper, at Christine's blog

[marcus]

Christine Dantas wants your idea of what was the best QG paper of 2005.

http://christinedantas.blogspot.com/

http://christinedantas.blogspot.com/2006/01/vote-for-best-quantum-gravity-paper-in.html

 

[selfAdjoint]

Thaks for the link Marcus. Note that your second URL, http://christinedantas.blogspot.com/2006/01/vote-for-best-quantum-gravity-paper-in.html , is the permanent link to the background independent QG competition.

BTW she credits the suggestion to a commenter at Not Even Wrong, whose tag is "who". I've read a few of "who"'s comments and have my suspicions, but could it be anyone we know?

 

[marcus]

... could it be anyone we know?

I'll never tell

Please vote! and help make Christine's blog a success. (it's new and she needs more people to comment)

BTW someone should nominate the 2005 Loll et al paper "Reconstructing the Universe"

 

[Chronos]

marcus, I too like Freidel, but am also partial to this candidate:

http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0509163
Do we Observe Quantum Gravity Effects at Galactic Scales?
Authors: M. Reuter, H. Weyer

 

[marcus]

Today Christine closed the nominations and posted the results.
The top three (most-nominated for best 2005 QG paper) are:

"Effective 3d Quantum Gravity and Non-Commutative Quantum Field Theory", by Laurent Freidel and Etera R. Livine [hep-th/0512113]

"Do we Observe Quantum Gravity Effects at Galactic Scales?", by M. Reuter and H. Weyer [astro-ph/0509163]

"The case for background independence", by Lee Smolin [hep-th/0507235]

Besides these, she lists 5 other papers which were also nominated of which two happened to be co-authored by Freidel. He's popular this year.

http://christinedantas.blogspot.com/2006/01/nominations-results.html

 

[Chronos]

All great papers! Tough choices. Another paper I very much liked was

Quantum gravity in terms of topological observables", by L. Freidel and A. Starodubtsev [hep-th/0501191]

Some of the others had more interesting content, but none were more beautifully written, IMO.

 

[marcus]

I just looked again at Christine's results and it appears that some technical difficulty prevented another paper from making the list.

It could well have made the top 3 or 4 papers but the person nominating it had some login problem (which I don't understand)

http://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/0510011
Quantum Spin Dynamics VIII. The Master Constraint
Thomas Thiemann
19 pages
AEI-2005-152

"Recently the Master Constraint Programme (MCP) for Loop Quantum Gravity (LQG) was launched which replaces the infinite number of Hamiltonian constraints by a single Master constraint. The MCP is designed to overcome the complications associated with
the non-Lie-algebra structure of the Dirac algebra of Hamiltonian constraints and was successfully tested in various field theory models. For the case of 3+1 gravity itself, so far only a positive quadratic form for the Master Constraint Operator was derived. In this paper we close this gap and prove that the quadratic form is closable and thus stems from a unique self-adjoint Master Constraint Operator. The proof rests on a simple feature of the general pattern according to which Hamiltonian constraints in LQG are constructed and thus extends to arbitrary matter coupling and holds for any metric signature. With this result the existence of a physical Hilbert space for LQG is established by standard spectral analysis."