Loop Quantum Gravity and the The Planck Regime of Cosmology
  The very early universe provides the best arena we currently have to test
quantum gravity theories. The success of the inflationary paradigm in
accounting for the observed inhomogeneities in the cosmic microwave background
already illustrates this point to a certain extent because the paradigm is
based on quantum field theory on the curved cosmological space-times. However,
this analysis excludes the Planck era because the background space-time
satisfies Einstein's equations all the way back to the big bang singularity.
Using techniques from loop quantum gravity, the paradigm has now been extended
to a self-consistent theory from the Planck regime to the onset of inflation,
covering some 11 orders of magnitude in curvature. In addition, for a narrow
window of initial conditions, there are departures from the standard paradigm,
with novel effects, such as a modification of the consistency relation
involving the scalar and tensor power spectra and a new source for
non-Gaussianities. Thus, the genesis of the large scale structure of the
universe can be traced back to quantum gravity fluctuations \emph{in the Planck
regime}. This report provides a bird's eye view of these developments for the
general relativity community.
