Francesca Vidotto
Francesca Vidotto
I'm fascinated by fundamental questions: what is space? what is time? where does matter come from? how can a new understanding of these issues provide us a better description of the evolution of the universe?
With these questions in mind, I would like to address the open problems in early cosmology, exploring the regime where a quantum theory of gravity is needed. I think there should be a particular attention in trying to apply our knowledge in quantum gravity to cosmology as much as we can, as cosmology is by far the best window to observe signatures of quantum gravity in the near future.
My work is focused on Loop Quantum Gravity (LQG), one of the main approaches to the quantization of gravity. It has been approximately a decade since the techniques of loop quantization were first used in cosmology, giving life to an active sub-field, that goes under the name of Loop Quantum Cosmology (LQC). In LQG, the dynamics can be expressed using two different languages: the canonical one, given using a Hamiltonian, and the covariant one, where dynamics is coded by a transition amplitude obtained summing over histories. The Spinfoam theory is this covariant version of LQG. In this formalism the amplitudes give the probability to pass from a given configuration of space- time to another.
I have applied for the first time the covariant formalism to cosmology. I have proposed a covariant version of quantum cosmology based on the complete LQG quantum theory (where symmetries are not implemented before the quantization). This is a new approach to quantum cosmology, called Spinfoam Cosmology.