Choice of Gauge in Quantum Gravity

Abstract

This paper is an extended version of the talk given at 19th Texas Symposium of Relativistic Astrophysics and Cosmology, Paris, 1998. It reviews of some recent work; mathematical details are skipped. It is well-known that a choice of gauge in generally covariant models has a twofold pupose: not only to render the dynamics unique, but also to define the spacetime points. A geometric way of choosing gauge that is not based on coordinate conditions---the so-called covariant gauge fixing---is described. After a covariant gauge fixing, the dynamics is unique and the background manifold points are well-defined, but the description remains invariant with respect to all diffeomorphisms of the background manifold. Transformations between different covariant gauge fixings form the well-known Bergmann-Komar group. Each covariant gauge fixing determines a so-called Kucha\v{r} decomposition. The construction of the quantum theory is based on the Kucha\v{r} form of the action and the Dirac method of operator constraints. It is demonstrated that the Bergmann-Komar group is too large to be implementable by unitary maps in the quantum domain.