Speaker: 
Anthony Preston
Date: 
Thursday, January 21, 2016 - 13:00
Room: 
Building 46, seminar room (5th floor)
Title: 
Towards a manifestly diffeomorphism invariant Exact Renormalization Group
Abstract: 

I will present progress towards a manifestly diffeomorphism invariant Exact Renormalization Group. Based on a generalization of the Polchinski flow equation, this is an approach towards quantum gravity without fixing a gauge, ensuring that results are independent of coordinates. It has both fixed-background and background-independent versions that are complementary to each other. In background independent form, I will discuss the structure of the flow equation and the construction of effective actions. In fixed background form, I will outline the derivation of the exact tree-level n-point expansion and corresponding Ward identities.