Dilaton Gravity in Two Dimensions

TL;DR

This paper reviews two-dimensional dilaton gravity models, highlighting their role in understanding quantum gravity, especially for black holes and string-inspired systems, emphasizing recent advances in exact quantization methods.

Contribution

It compiles and contextualizes recent progress in the exact quantization of 2D dilaton gravity, providing a coherent overview of the field's developments.

Findings

Exact quantization of geometric sectors achieved

Systematic quantum field theoretical treatment developed

Insights applicable to black holes and string-inspired models

Abstract

The study of general two dimensional models of gravity allows to tackle basic questions of quantum gravity, bypassing important technical complications which make the treatment in higher dimensions difficult. As the physically important examples of spherically symmetric Black Holes, together with string inspired models, belong to this class, valuable knowledge can also be gained for these systems in the quantum case. In the last decade new insights regarding the exact quantization of the geometric part of such theories have been obtained. They allow a systematic quantum field theoretical treatment, also in interactions with matter, without explicit introduction of a specific classical background geometry. The present review tries to assemble these results in a coherent manner, putting them at the same time into the perspective of the quite large literature on this subject.