It is an old speculation in physics that, once the gravitational field is successfully quantized, it should serve as the natural regulator of infrared and ultraviolet singularities that plague quantum field theories in a background metric. We demonstrate that this idea is implemented in a precise sense within the framework of four-dimensional canonical Lorentzian quantum gravity in the continuu...

We propose a construction for nonlinear off-shell gauge field theories based on a constrained system quantized in the sense of deformation quantization. The key idea is to consider the star-product BFV–BRST master equation as an equation of motion. The construction is formulated in terms of the BRST extention of the unfolded formalism that can also be understood as an appropriate generalization...

We consider a two-component quantum Hall system within a Landau-Ginzburg theory with two Chern-Simons gauge fields. From this theory we derive a sigma model covariantly coupled to one Chern-Simons field and find mean field solutions that could describe partially polarized quantum Hall states. The quasiparticles in the original model, which have quantized charge and spin, are described in the co...

Franck and Hertz described the first observation of quantized excitation in 1914, one year after Bohr published his theory of the hydrogen atom with its concept of quantized energy states. They discovered that electrons moving through mercury vapor with an energy greater than or equal to a critical value near 4.9 eV can excite the 2536 Å line of the mercury spectrum. Electrons with less than th...

We propose a quantum theory of membranes designed such that the ground-state wavefunction of the membrane with compact spatial topology Σh reproduces the partition function of the bosonic string on worldsheet Σh. The construction involves worldvolume matter at quantum criticality, described in the simplest case by Lifshitz scalars with dynamical critical exponent z = 2. This matter system must ...