Midisuperspace models of canonical quantum gravity (Q1805660)

This is an excellent paper on midisuperspace models of canonical quantum gravity. It is a very well-written and contains a short history as well as an up-to-date account on problems and proposals of solutions in canonical quantization of gravitation and related areas with particular reference to three main topics which are treated in details. (1) The problem of the symmetry reduction or symmetric criticality principle [\textit{R. Palais}, Commun. Math. Phys. 69, 19-30 (1979; Zbl 0417.58007)]. The author gives necessary and sufficient conditions such that a given symmetry reduction can be performed at the level of the Lagrangian or Hamiltonian. (2) Two-Killing-Vector Midisuperspace [\textit{K. Kuchar}, Phys. Rev. D 4, 955 (1971)]. The author gives an account on some recent results on the Hamiltonian structure of a popular class of midisuperspace models with cylindrical or toroidal symmetry (these are examples of ``two-Killing-vector models''). The author presents a result which generalizes a work of Kuchar and leads to a nice scheme for canonical quantization of gravitation. (3) Quantization on curved surfaces. The models in (2) allow one to turn the problem of finding a gauge-invariant canonical quantization of the two-Killing-vector models into the problem of quantizing certain parametrized field theories. The latter is an interesting problem in its own right studied also by Dirac [\textit{P. Dirac}, Lectures on Quantum Mechanics, Yeshiva University, NY (1964)] who called the problem ``quantization on curved surfaces''. The author reviews some recent result in this area [\textit{C. Torre} and \textit{M. Varadarajan}, Phys. Rev. D 58, 064007 (1998) and Classical Quantum Gravity 16, 2651-2668 (1999)].