Abstracts

Renate Loll

Quantum Ricci curvature

Curvature provides a very important way of understanding the properties of classical spacetime. However, in the context of nonperturbative quantum gravity, the realization of meaningful quantum curvature observables in a Planckian regime has not received much attention. In an exciting new development, we have been able to define and operationally construct "quantum Ricci curvature", inspired by a classical notion of sphere distance. The proposal has been tested on a variety of piecewise flat geometries and in two-dimensional, dynamically triangulated quantum gravity. The results look very promising and indicate that quantum Ricci curvature may give us a new way of characterizing spacetime at the Planck scale.