Using numerical calculations, we compare three versions of the Barrett-Crane model of 4-dimensional Riemannian quantum gravity. In the version with face and edge amplitudes as described by De Pietri, Freidel, Krasnov, and Rovelli, we show the partition function diverges very rapidly for many triangulated 4-manifolds. In the version with modified face and edge amplitudes due to Perez and Rovelli, we show the partition function converges so rapidly that the sum is dominated by spin foams where all the spins labelling faces are zero except for small, widely separated islands of higher spin. We also describe a new version which appears to have a convergent partition function without drastic spin-zero dominance. Finally, after a general discussion of how to extract physics from spin foam models, we discuss the implications of convergence or divergence of the partition function for other aspects of a spin foam model.

We begin by showing that in a triangulated category, specifying a projective class is equivalent to specifying an ideal I of morphisms with certain properties and that if I has these properties, then so does each of its powers. We show how a projective class leads to an Adams spectral sequence and give some results on the convergence and collapsing of this spectral sequence. We use this to study various ideals. In the stable homotopy category we examine phantom maps, skeletal phantom maps, superphantom maps, and ghosts. (A ghost is a map which induces the zero map of homotopy groups.) We show that ghosts lead to a stable analogue of the Lusternik Schnirelmann category of a space, and we calculate this stable analogue for low-dimensional real projective spaces. We also give a relation between ghosts and the Hopf and Kervaire invariant problems. In the case of A modules over an A ring spectrum, the ghost spectral sequence is a universal coefficient spectral sequence. From the phantom projective class we derive a generalized Milnor sequence for filtered diagrams of finite spectra, and from this it follows that the group of phantom maps from X to Y can always be described as a 1 group. The last two sections focus on algebraic examples. In the derived category of an abelian category we study the ideal of maps inducing the zero map of homology groups and find a natural setting for a result of Kelly on the vanishing of composites of such maps. We also explain how pure exact sequences relate to phantom maps in the derived category of a ring and give an example showing that phantoms can compose non-trivially. Academic Press

Abstract. The Riemannian 10j symbols are spin networks that assign an amplitude to each 4-simplex in the Barrett-Crane model of Riemannian quantum gravity. This amplitude is a function of the areas of the 10 faces of the 4-simplex, and Barrett and Williams have shown that one contribution to its asymptotics comes from the Regge action for all non-degenerate 4-simplices with the specified face areas. However, we show numerically that the dominant contribution comes from degenerate 4-simplices. As a consequence, one can compute the asymptotics of the Riemannian 10j symbols by evaluating a 'degenerate spin network', where the rotation group SO (4) is replaced by the Euclidean group of isometries of R 3 . We conjecture formulas for the asymptotics of a large class of Riemannian and Lorentzian spin networks in terms of these degenerate spin networks, and check these formulas in some special cases. Among other things, this conjecture implies that the Lorentzian 10j symbols are asymptotic to 1/16 times the Riemannian ones.

Abstract. We show that a diffeological bundle gives rise to an exact sequence of internal tangent spaces. We then introduce two new classes of diffeological spaces, which we call weakly filtered and filtered diffeological spaces, whose tangent spaces are easier to understand. These are the diffeological spaces whose categories of pointed plots are (weakly) filtered. We extend the exact sequence one step further in the case of a diffeological bundle with filtered total space and base space. We also show that the tangent bundle T H X defined by Hector is a diffeological vector space over X when X is filtered or when X is a homogeneous space, and therefore agrees with the dvs tangent bundle introduced by the authors in a previous paper.

Diffeological spaces are generalizations of smooth manifolds which include singular spaces and function spaces. For each diffeological space, Iglesias-Zemmour introduced a natural topology called the D-topology. However, the D-topology has not yet been studied seriously in the existing literature. In this paper, we develop the basic theory of the D-topology for diffeological spaces. We explain that the topological spaces that arise as the D-topology of a diffeological space are exactly the ∆-generated spaces and give results and examples which help to determine when a space is ∆-generated. Our most substantial results show how the D-topology on the function space C ∞ (M, N ) between smooth manifolds compares to other well-known topologies.