VASSILIEV INVARIANTS - A NEW FRAMEWORK FOR QUANTUM-GRAVITY

We show that Vassiliev invariants of knots, appropriately generalized to the spin network context, are loop differentiable in spite of being diffeomorphism invariant. This opens the possibility of defining rigo rously the constraints of quantum gravity as geometrical operators act ing on the space of Vassiliev invariants of spin nets, We show how to explicitly realize the diffeomorphism constraint on this space and pre sent proposals for the construction of Hamiltonian constraints. (C) 19 98 Published by Elsevier Science B.V.