Physics/Astronomy seminar 7777 section 4 - General Relativity

Instructor: Jorge Pullin, pullin@lsu.edu, 578-0464

Fridays 4:40-5:30p room 201 Nicholson

This course will be a seminar on general relativity. We will discuss selected papers and topics every week. The material will be announced the week before. Participants are supposed to have read the material before the class at the level of being able to summarize it. This semester we will explore some formal issues in general relativity (constrained systems, Hamiltonian dynamics). We will use quite a bit the book by Henneaux and Teitelboim "Quantization of gauge systems".

Class 1, January 20th, Nils Dorband will lead a discussion on his recent paper.

Class 2, January 27th, Peter Diener will lead a discussion on his recent paper.

Class 3, February 3rd, we will start the discussion of the book by Henneaux and Teitelboim. We will cover probably 1.2 and 1.3.

Class 4, February 10th, cancelled.

Class 5, February 17th, we will continue with chapter 1. pages here.

Class 6, February 24th, cancelled.

Class 7,8 March 1, 3 continuation of chapter 1.

Class 9 March 10 Cancelled

Class 10 March 14 conclusion of chapter 1.

Class 11 March 17 Chapter 4.

Class 11 March 29 Chapter 5. In room 262 Nicholson. Notes on canonical transformations by Goldstein here.

Class 12 March 31 We will finish chapter 5 and discuss the paper on the Abelianization of constraints by Markopoulou.

Class 13 April 5th, 5:30pm room TBA. Paper by Crnkovic and Witten.

Class 14 April 19th, 5:30pm room 262. Paper by Abers and Lee on Yang-Mills theory.

Class 15 April 27th, 5:30pm room 262. Paper by Sengupta on path integrals.

Class 16 May 5th, 4:40pm room 201. Paper by Macias, Obregon and Ryan about supergravity as the square root of gravity.