General Relativity & Quantum Cosmology

After giving an overview of the basic features of Horava gravity, I will focus on the latest developments and argue that, at least for the most general and complete version of the theory, the infrared phenomenology is by now relatively well understood and pathologies have been tamed. This implies that time has come for the theory to face a new series of intriguing challenges, related to quantization, ultraviolet phenomenology, black holes and singularities etc. I will present some ideas and first results in some of these directions.

We introduce an exactly solvable model to test various proposals for the imposition of the spin foam simplicity constraints. This model is a three-dimensional Holst-Plebanski action for the gauge group SO(4), in which the simplicity constraints mimic the situation of the four-dimensional theory. In particular, the canonical analysis reveals the presence of secondary second class constraints conjugated to the primary ones. We perform the spin foam quantization of the theory in the spirit of the BC and EPRL models, and give arguments for modifying the measure over the holonomies in order to account for the presence of the secondary second class constraints.

During the last couple of years Dupuis, Freidel, Livine, Speziale and Tambornino developed a twistorial formulation for loop quantum gravity.
Constructed from Ashtekar--Barbero variables, the formalism is restricted to SU(2) gauge transformations.
In this talk, I perform the generalisation to the full Lorentzian case, that is the group SL(2,C).
The phase space of SL(2,C) (i.e. complex or selfdual) Ashtekar variables on a spinnetwork graph is decomposed in terms of twistorial variables. To every link there are two twistors---one to each boundary point---attached. The formalism provides a clean derivation of the solution space of the reality conditions of loop quantum gravity.
Key features of the EPRL spinfoam model are perfectly recovered.
If there is still time, I'll scatch my current project concerning a twistorial path integral for spinfoam gravity as well.