Loop Quantum Gravity and the The Planck Regime of Cosmology

Abstract: The very early universe provides the best arena we currently have to test quantum gravity theories. The success of the inflationary paradigm in accounting for the observed inhomogeneities in the cosmic microwave background already illustrates this point to a certain extent because the paradigm is based on quantum field theory on the curved cosmological space-times. However, this analysis excludes the Planck era because the background space-time satisfies Einstein's equations all the way back to the big bang singularity. Using techniques from loop quantum gravity, the paradigm has now been extended to a self-consistent theory from the Planck regime to the onset of inflation, covering some 11 orders of magnitude in curvature. In addition, for a narrow window of initial conditions, there are departures from the standard paradigm, with novel effects, such as a modification of the consistency relation involving the scalar and tensor power spectra and a new source for non-Gaussianities. Thus, the genesis of the large scale structure of the universe can be traced back to quantum gravity fluctuations \emph{in the Planck regime}. This report provides a bird's eye view of these developments for the general relativity community.