Seminário de Teoria de Cordas  

16/03/2009, 16:30 — 17:30 — Sala P3.10, Pavilhão de Matemática
Niklas Johansson, Uppsala University

Recent Developments in Three–Dimensional Gravity

Gravity in three dimensions strikes a balance between models that are tractable and models that are relevant. It may exhibit black hole solutions, graviton modes and asymptotically Anti-deSitter solutions. There have been great efforts in trying to quantize 3D gravity, but the results remain unsatisfactory. In this talk we review a recent approach to 3D gravity called "chiral gravity". This model has peculiar features giving some hope that it is particularly simple to quantize. However, there has been a sometimes heated debate regarding the stability of the model. We explain why, and give an updated status report.