{"paper":{"title":"Gravitational Hilbert spaces: invariant and co-invariant states, inner products, gauge-fixing, and BRST","license":"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/","headline":"","cross_cats":["gr-qc"],"primary_cat":"hep-th","authors_text":"Henry Maxfield, Jesse Held","submitted_at":"2025-09-05T18:00:04Z","abstract_excerpt":"Hilbert spaces in theories of gravity are notoriously subtle due to the Hamiltonian constraints, particularly regarding the inner product. To demystify this subject, we review and extend a collection of ideas in canonical gravity, and connect to the sum-over-histories approach by clarifying the Hilbert space interpretation of various gravitational path integrals. We use one-dimensional (or mini-superspace) models as the simplest context to exemplify the conceptual ideas. We emphasise that a physical Hilbert space can be defined either by requiring states to be annihilated by constraint operato"},"claims":{"count":0,"items":[],"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"source":{"id":"2509.05412","kind":"arxiv","version":3},"verdict":{"id":null,"model_set":{},"created_at":null,"strongest_claim":"","one_line_summary":"","pipeline_version":null,"weakest_assumption":"","pith_extraction_headline":""},"references":{"count":0,"sample":[],"resolved_work":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57","internal_anchors":0},"formal_canon":{"evidence_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"author_claims":{"count":0,"strong_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"builder_version":"pith-number-builder-2026-05-17-v1"}