2001/07/31 by Petr Hajicek, Claus Kiefer
Physics and Astronomy · #gr-qc
paper · pdf · doi:10.1142/s0218271801001578
published as Int.J.Mod.Phys. D10 (2001) 775-780 · 5 pages, 1 figure, received honorable mention in the 2001 essay competititon, to appear in Int. J. Mod. Phys. D
arxiv created 2001/07/31 · arxiv updated 2009/11/30
We discuss a model describing exactly a thin spherically symmetric shell of matter with zero rest mass. We derive the reduced formulation of this system in which the variables are embeddings, their conjugate momenta, and Dirac observables. A non-perturbative quantum theory of this model is then constructed, leading to a unitary dynamics. As a consequence of unitarity, the classical singularity is fully avoided in the quantum theory.