Description
Book SynopsisThis graduate textbook provides an introduction to quantum gravity, when spacetime is two-dimensional. The quantization of gravity is the main missing piece of theoretical physics, but in two dimensions it can be done explicitly with elementary mathematical tools, but it still has most of the conceptional riddles present in higher dimensional (not yet known) quantum gravity.
It provides an introduction to a very interdisciplinary field, uniting physics (quantum geometry) and mathematics (combinatorics) in a non-technical way, requiring no prior knowledge of quantum field theory or general relativity.
Using the path integral, the chapters provide self-contained descriptions of random walks, random trees and random surfaces as statistical systems where the free relativistic particle, the relativistic bosonic string and two-dimensional quantum gravity are obtained as scaling limits at phase transition points of these statistical systems. The geometric nature of the theori
Table of Contents
1. Preliminary Material Part 1: the Path Integral. 2. The Free Relativistic particle. 3. One-Dimensional Quantum Gravity. 4. Branched Polymers. 5. Random Surfaces and Bosonic Strings. 6. Two-Dimensional Quantum Gravity. 7. The Fractal Structure of 2D Gravity. 8. The Causal Dynamical Triangulation model. Appendix A: Preliminary Material Part 2: Green Functions. Appendix B: Problem Sets 1-12. Appendix C: Solutions to Problem Sets 1-13.
