Fundamental Aspects of Asymptotic Safety in Quantum Gravity

After an extensive introduction to the asymptotic safety approach to quantum gravity, this thesis explains recent key advances reported in four influential papers. Firstly, two exact solutions to the reconstruction problem (how to recover a bare action from the effective average action) are provided. Secondly, the fundamental requirement of background independence in quantum gravity is successfully implemented. Working within the derivative expansion of conformally reduced gravity, the noti...