[Martin]

Background independent QG/QC is a rapidly developing field and having an up-to-date set of links can be a valuable timesaver. Googlesearching everytime you need something can take up a lot of time, so I'll gather links here to recent work (including seminars and conference talks) in Loop and allied Quantum Cosmology and also related more general Quantum Gravity. These first links are mainly to help me (!) but in subsequent posts I will dig up some select ones I can recommend to suit different SFN posters' possible interests. Let me get the main ones out and then be more selective.

The most recent international QG conference, slides and in some cases audio to go with the slides (July 2008)
http://www.maths.not...Gsquared-slides
For people especially interested in cosmology, see the slides and audio file of the Tuesday morning talk by Ashtekar.

A recent workshop focusing on LQG/LQC slides only (March 2008)
http://www.fuw.edu.p...cki/zakopane08/
People interested in cosmology might want to look at the slides for Ashtekar's talk and those for Bojowald's talk. I find Ashtekar's March slides more informative than his July slides, more picture of what I want to see. More cases considered---aimed at more specialized audience.

A conference call international seminar series:
http://relativity.phys.lsu.edu/ilqgs/

An archive of video seminar talks (split screen format to show both slides and speaker):
http://pirsa.org/

Searchable archives:
http://arxiv.org/
http://www.slac.stanford.edu/spires/

A brief history of Quantum Cosmology research, using the Spires search tool. Here is what you type into the searchbox:
Find dk quantum cosmology and date >1996 and <2000
Find dk quantum cosmology and date >1999 and <2003
Find dk quantum cosmology and date >2002 and <2006
Find dk quantum cosmology and date >2005 and <2009
So Spires does a keyword search for QC research papers published in four time periods each 3 years long starting [1997,1999].
Set the sort preference to sort the papers by citation count, so you get the most highly cited papers from the designated time period.
These will often be the ones that researchers found the most useful or which had the most impact, so they will be roughly representative
of QC research in that time period. (Citation counts are not a perfect measure, but they roughly approximate how the expert community rates research.)

The above four searches will generate the following four lists of papers, including an abstract summary and a citation count for each:
http://www.slac.stan...itecount%28d%29
http://www.slac.stan...itecount%28d%29
http://www.slac.stan...itecount%28d%29
http://www.slac.stan...itecount%28d%29

In the first three year time period, 2 of the top 20 papers were Loop QC.
In the next time period, 8 of the top 20 were Loop.
In the next, 13 were Loop.
In the most recent (2006 to present), 17 were.
The other papers in the most highly cited 20 tend to have to do with branes and the like. You can click on the links, check it out and form your own impression. That's one way of seeing what's been happening "on the ground" in Quantum Cosmology research over the past 12 years, and getting an idea of the activity and focus of the field.

A major international conference series for the field of cosmology and gravitation as a whole is the GRG (General Relativity and Gravitation) held every 3 years. The most recent was GR18, Sydney in July 2007.
http://www.grg18.com/
The next GRG conference, GR19, will be in Mexico City in the summer of 2010. These are relatively large affairs with 500-600 participants. The conference programmes let one track the changing prominence of quantum cosmology as a subfield in a broader context.

This post has been edited by Martin: 24 October 2008 - 10:31 PM

[Martin]

If I had to recommend just one article giving an overview of the current state of research in quantum cosmology, it would be this October 2008 paper by Ashtekar.
http://arxiv.org/abs/0810.0514
It gives a history of QC and some deep reflections on where the field is going, as well as a current status report. It has very few equations, he mostly says in words what he has to say. However the vocabulary is technical. It was an address given to a conference of fellow scientists celebrating the Minkowski centennial. So a lot of the paper is tough going in parts, but it's still useful. If you can read just 10 pages out of the total 31, you can get the man's honest view of where we are.

For online public outreach writing on quantum cosmology, there are a few articles at Einstein Online that deal with the subject in general terms. Links are down at the bottom of this page:
http://www.einstein-...logy/index.html

This post has been edited by Martin: 29 October 2008 - 06:40 PM

[Martin]

Martin said:

...
A major international conference series for the field of cosmology and gravitation as a whole is the GRG (General Relativity and Gravitation) held every 3 years. The most recent was GR18, Sydney in July 2007.
http://www.grg18.com/
The next GRG conference, GR19, will be in Mexico City in the summer of 2010. These are relatively large affairs with 500-600 participants. The conference programmes let one track the changing prominence of quantum cosmology as a subfield in a broader context.

The GR19 conference now has a website.
http://www.gr19.com/

In March 2009 there will be a workshop on loop quantum gravity black holes
http://www.uv.es/bhlqg/

26-28 March 2009--at University of Valencia.
Black Holes and LQG
"A partial list of topics to be covered is as follows:

- Black hole entropy in LQG
- Spin foam approach to black holes
- Singularity resolution and information loss
- Prospects for a detailed description of the Hawking radiation
- Comparison between results from LQG and other approaches

This will be a 'Discussion Workshop'. Therefore a significant time will be set aside for a critical evaluation of ideas that are being pursued in current research and on finding fertile directions for future work."
The list of talks has not been posted yet.
The scientific committee (responsible for putting the program together) are:
Abhay Ashtekar (IGC-PSU, USA)
Fernando Barbero (IEM-CSIC, Spain)
Alejandro Corichi (IM-UNAM, Mexico)
Jerzy Lewandowski (Universytet Warszawski, Poland)
Guillermo Mena (IEM-CSIC, Spain)
Hanno Sahlmann (Universität Karlsruhe, Germany)
Thomas Thiemann (AEI, Germany)
Madhavan Varadarajan (RRI, India)

This post has been edited by Martin: 10 January 2009 - 09:39 PM

[alex sam]

thank you for links

[Bilal M Mirza]

To get more detail for this topic please visit http://www.solutioninn.com

[Martin]

These links are old. The thread is dated. I will move it to the speculations trash and think what new resource links for QC and QG to post.