Closure of Constraints for Plane Gravity Waves

Abstract

The metric for gravitational plane waves has very high symmetry (two spacelike commuting Killing vectors). For this high symmetry, a simple renormalization of the lapse function is found which allows the constraint algebra for canonical quantum gravity to close; also, the vector constraint has the correct form to generate spatial diffeomorphisms. A measure is constructed which respects the reality conditions, but does not yet respect the invariances of the theory.