Spacetime emergence in group field theory

Title: 

Spacetime emergence in group field theory

Abstract: 

The failure of a simple perturbative quantisation of general relativity
suggests that quantum gravity is fundamentally non-perturbative, defined
by a path integral or sum over spacetime histories. In some approaches
even the spacetime manifold and its topology are not fixed background
structures but part of the sum: we then have a quantum theory "of, not
on spacetime". I will briefly review one such approach, group field
theory, which can be seen as an extension of matrix and tensor models to
higher dimensions. I will highlight a number of applications to
cosmology, including the derivation of an effective Friedmann equation
(with higher-curvature corrections leading to a bounce) for homogeneous
cosmology, and recent work showing how a spacetime metric can be
extracted from this formalism, paving the way towards a physical
interpretation of many other solutions of the theory.