The physical boundary Hilbert space and volume operator in the Lorentzian new spin-foam theory

Abstract

A covariant spin-foam formulation of quantum gravity has been recently developed, characterized by a kinematics which appears to match well the one of canonical loop quantum gravity. In this paper we reconsider the implementation of the constraints that defines the model. We define in a simple way the boundary Hilbert space of the theory, introducing a slight modification of the embedding of the SU(2) representations into the ones. We then show directly that all constraints vanish on this space in a weak sense. The vanishing is exact (and not just in the large quantum number limit). We also generalize the definition of the volume operator in the spin-foam model to the Lorentzian signature and show that it matches the one of loop quantum gravity, as in the Euclidean case.