Gravitational phase operator and cosmic strings.

A quantum equivalence principle is formulated by means of a gravitational phase operator which is an element of the Poincare group. This is applied to the spinning cosmic string which suggests that it may contain gravitational torsion. A new exact solution of the EinsteinCartan-Sciama-Kibble equations for the gravitational field with torsion is obtained everywhere for a cosmic string with uniform energy density, spin density and flux. A novel effect due to the quantized gravitational field of the cosmic string on the wave function of a particle outside the string is used to show that spacetime points are not meaningful in quantum gravity. Submitted to Physical Review D. gr-qc/9507049