Cosmological particle production in a quantum field simulator as a quantum mechanical scattering problem
Christian F. Schmidt, Álvaro Parra-López, Mireia Tolosa-Simeón, Marius Sparn, Elinor Kath, Nikolas Liebster, Jelte Duchene, Helmut Strobel, Markus K. Oberthaler… 展开作者
Christian F. Schmidt, Álvaro Parra-López, Mireia Tolosa-Simeón, Marius Sparn, Elinor Kath, Nikolas Liebster, Jelte Duchene, Helmut Strobel, Markus K. Oberthaler, Stefan Floerchinger
备注：
References and new section added. (22 + 14) pages, (13 + 7) figures, (1+1) tables
The production of quantum field excitations or particles in cosmological spacetimes is a hallmark prediction of curved quantum field theory. The generation of cosmological perturbations from quantum fluctuations in the early universe constitutes an important application. The problem can be quantum-simulated in terms of structure formation in an interacting Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) with time-dependent s-wave scattering length. Here, we explore a mapping between cosmological particle production in general (D+1)-dimensional spacetimes and scattering problems described by the non-relativistic stationary Schrödinger equation in one dimension. Through this mapping, intuitive explanations for emergent spatial structures in both the BEC and the cosmological system can be obtained for a large class of analogue cosmological scenarios, ranging from power-law expansions to periodic modulations. The investigated cosmologies and their scattering analogues are tuned to be implemented in a (2+1)-dimensional quantum field simulator.
We exhibit a mechanism which dynamically adjusts cosmological constant toward $0^+$. The adjustment is quantum-mechanical, discharging cosmological constant in random discrete steps. It renders de Sitter space unstable, and triggers its decay toward Minkowski. Since the instability dynamically stops at $Λ= 0$, the evolution favors the terminal Minkowski space without a need for anthropics. The mechanism works for any QFT coupled to gravity.
A theory of quantum-mechanical generation of cosmological perturbations is considered. The conclusion of this study is that if the large-angular-scale anisotropy in the cosmic microwave background radiation is caused by the long-wavelength cosmological perturbations of quantum mechanical origin, they are, most likely, gravitational waves, rather than density perturbations or rotational perturbations. Some disagreements with previous publications are clarified. This contribution to the Proceedings is based on Reference~[34].
Cosmological perturbations generated quantum-mechanically (as a particular case, during inflation) possess statistical properties of squeezed quantum states. The power spectra of the perturbations are modulated and the angular distribution of the produced temperature fluctuations of the CMBR is quite specific. An exact formula is derived for the angular correlation function of the temperature fluctuations caused by squeezed gravitational waves. The predicted angular pattern can, in principle, be revealed by the COBE-type observations.
It is shown that rotational cosmological perturbations can be generated in the early Universe, similarly to gravitational waves. The generating mechanism is quantum-mechanical in its nature, and the created perturbations should now be placed in squeezed vacuum quantum states. The physical conditions under which the phenomenon can occur are formulated. The generated perturbations can contribute to the large-angular-scale anisotropy of the cosmic microwave background radiation. An exact formula is derived for the angular correlation function of the temperature variations caused by the quantum-me…
We propose that gravity be intrinsically quantum-mechanical, so that in the absence of quantum mechanics the geometry of the universe would be Minkowski. We show that in such a situation gravity does not require any independent quantization of its own, with it being quantized simply by virtue of its being coupled to the quantized matter fields that serve as its source. We show that when the gravitational and matter fields possess an underlying conformal symmetry, the gravitational field and fermionic matter-field zero-point fluctuations cancel each other identically. Then, when the fermions ac…
We present a minisuperspace analysis of a class of Lorentzian wormholes that evolves quantum mechanically in a background Friedman Robertson Walker spacetime. The quantum mechanical wavefunction for these wormholes is obtained by solving the Wheeler-DeWitt equation for Einstein gravity on this minisuperspace. The time-dependent expectation value of the wormhole throat radius is calculated to lowest order in an adiabatic expansion of the Wheeler-DeWitt hamiltonian. For a radiation dominated expansion, the radius is shown to relax asymptotically to obtain a value of order the Planck length while…
This review article aims at presenting the theory of inflation. We first describe the background spacetime behavior during the slow-roll phase and analyze how inflation ends and the Universe reheats. Then, we present the theory of cosmological perturbations with special emphasis on their behavior during inflation. In particular, we discuss the quantum-mechanical nature of the fluctuations and show how the uncertainty principle fixes the amplitude of the perturbations. In a next step, we calculate the inflationary power spectra in the slow-roll approximation and compare these theoretical predic…
In applications of Einstein gravity one replaces the quantum-mechanical energy-momentum tensor of sources such as the degenerate electrons in a white dwarf or the black-body photons in the microwave background by c-number matrix elements. And not only that, one ignores the zero-point fluctuations in these sources by only retaining the normal-ordered parts of those matrix elements. There is no apparent justification for this procedure, and we show that it is precisely this procedure that leads to the cosmological constant problem. We suggest that solving the problem requires that gravity be tre…
The genuine quantum gravity effects can already be around us. It is likely that the observed large-angular-scale anisotropies in the microwave background radiation are induced by cosmological perturbations of quantum-mechanical origin. Such perturbations are placed in squeezed vacuum quantum states and, hence, are characterized by large variances of their amplitude. The statistical properties of the anisotropies should reflect the underlying statistics of the squeezed vacuum quantum states. In this paper, the theoretical variances for the temperature angular correlation function are described …
The possibility of extending the quantum mechanical superposition principle to free parameters such as the cosmological constant appearing in the Lagrangian of physical theories is examined. If the cosmological constant is subject to a quantum mechanical superposition principle, its observed value is a weighted average of its two natural values, one at the Planck scale and the other at zero. As zero and nonzero values of the cosmological constant leads to topologically distinct spacetimes, the amplitude for the cosmological constant to take a Planck scale value is weighted over a topological E…
We study the dynamical consequences of Maggiore's unique generalised uncertainty principle (GUP). We find that it leads naturally, and generically, to novel consequences. In the high temperature limit, there is a drastic reduction in the degrees of freedom, of the type found, for example, in strings far above the Hagedorn temperature. In view of this, the present GUP may perhaps be taken as the new version of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, conjectured by Atick and Witten to be responsible for such reduction. Also, the present GUP leads naturally to varying speed of light and modified di…
The mechanical first law (MFL) of black hole spacetimes is a geometrical relation which relates variations of mass parameter and horizon area. While it is well known that the MFL of asymptotic flat black hole is equivalent to its thermodynamical first law, however we do not know the detail of MFL of black hole spacetimes with cosmological constant which possess black hole and cosmological event horizons. Then this paper aims to formulate an MFL of the two-horizon spacetimes. For this purpose, we try to include the effects of two horizons in the MFL. To do so, we make use of the Iyer-Wald forma…
We derive the Shafieloo, Hazra, Sahni and Starobinsky (SHSS) phenomenological formula for the radioactive-like decay of metastable dark energy directly from the quantum mechanics principles. For this aim we use the Fock-Krylov theory of quantum unstable states. We obtain deeper insight on the decay process as having three basic phases: the phase of radioactive decay, the next phase of damping oscillations, and finally the phase of power law decaying. We consider the cosmological model with matter and dark energy in the form of decaying metastable dark energy and study its dynamics in the frame…
Quantum mechanical effects related to the recently developed projective theory of relativity are considered. It is shown that at cosmological time intervals the light velocity increases and the atomic units of length and time are shrinking. A new derivation of the Hubble Law is presented.
If the large-angular-scale anisotropy in the cosmic microwave background radiation is caused by the long-wavelength cosmological perturbations of quantum mechanical origin, they are, most likely, gravitational waves, rather than density perturbations or rotational perturbations.
Recently, we presented a unified way of analysing classical cosmological perturbation in generalized gravity theories. In this paper, we derive the perturbation spectrums generated from quantum fluctuations again in unified forms. We consider a situation where an accelerated expansion phase of the early universe is realized in a particular generic phase of the generalized gravity. We take the perturbative semiclassical approximation which treats the perturbed parts of the metric and matter fields as quantum mechanical operators. Our generic results include the conventional power-law and expone…
Wheeler's conjectured "spacetime foam" -- large quantum fluctuations of spacetime at the Planck scale -- could have important implications for quantum gravity, perhaps even explaining why the cosmological constant seems so small. Here I explore this problem in a midisuperspace model consisting of metrics with local spherical symmetry. Classically, an infinite class of ``foamy'' initial data can be constructed, in which cancellations between expanding and contracting regions lead to a small average expansion even if $Λ$ is large. Quantum mechanically, the model admits corresponding stationary s…
In the context of inflation, non-vacuum initial states for cosmological perturbations that possess a built in scale are studied. It is demonstrated that this assumption leads to a falsifiable class of models. The question of whether they lead to conflicts with the available observations is addressed. For this purpose, the power spectrum of the Bardeen potential operator is calculated and compared with the CMBR anisotropies measurements and the redshift surveys of galaxies and clusters of galaxies. Generic predictions of the model are: a high first acoustic peak, the presence of a bump in the m…
We study quantum cosmology with conformal matter comprising a perfect radiation fluid and a number of conformally coupled scalar fields. Focusing initially on the collective coordinates (minisuperspace) associated with homogeneous, isotropic backgrounds, we are able to perform the quantum gravity path integral exactly. The evolution describes a "perfect bounce", in which the Universe passes smoothly through the singularity. We extend the analysis to spatially flat, anisotropic universes, treated exactly, and to generic inhomogeneous, anisotropic perturbations treated at linear and nonlinear or…
Coupling any interacting quantum mechanical system to gravity in one dimension requires the cosmological constant to belong to the matter energy spectrum and thus to be quantized, even though the gravity sector is free of any quantum dynamics, while physical states are also confined to the subspace of matter quantum states whose energy coincides with the cosmological constant value. These general facts are illustrated through some simple examples. The physical projector quantization approach readily leads to the correct representation of such systems, whereas other approaches relying on gauge …
In this article, we study the no-boundary wave function in scalar-tensor gravity with various potentials for the non-minimally coupled scalar field. Our goal is to calculate probabilities for the scalar field - and hence the effective gravitational coupling and cosmological constant - to take specific values. Most calculations are done in the minisuperspace approximation, and we use a saddle point approximation for the Euclidean action, which is then evaluated numerically. We find that for potentials that have several minima, none of them is substantially preferred by the quantum mechanical pr…
The $q$-theory approach to the cosmological constant problem is reconsidered. The new observation is that the effective classical $q$-theory gets modified due to the backreaction of quantum-mechanical particle production by spacetime curvature. Furthermore, a Planck-scale cosmological constant is added to the potential term of the action density, in order to represent the effects from zero-point energies and phase transitions. The resulting dynamical equations of a spatially-flat Friedmann-Robertson-Walker universe are then found to give a steady approach to the Minkowski vacuum, with attracto…
We consider the Universe deep inside the cell of uniformity. At these scales, the Universe is filled with inhomogeneously distributed discrete structures (galaxies, groups and clusters of galaxies), which perturb the background Friedmann model. Here, the mechanical approach (Eingorn & Zhuk, 2012) is the most appropriate to describe the dynamics of the inhomogeneities which is defined, on the one hand, by gravitational potentials of inhomogeneities and, on the other hand, by the cosmological expansion of the Universe. In this paper, we present additional arguments in favor of this approach. Fir…
In this article we present a new outlook on the cosmology, based on the quantum model proposed by M. Hall, D.-A. Deckert and H. Wiseman (HDW). In continuation of the idea of that model we consider finitely many classical homogeneous and isotropic universes whose evolutions are determined by the standard Einstein-Friedman equations but that also interact with each other quantum-mechanically via the mechanism proposed by HDW. The crux of the idea lies in the fact that unlike every other interpretation of the quantum mechanics, the HDW model requires no decoherence mechanism and thus allows the q…
In this paper, using the concept of Lewis Riesenfeld invariant quantum operator method for finding continuous eigenvalues of quantum mechanical wave functions we derive the analytical expressions for the cosmological geometric phase, which is commonly identified to be the Pancharatnam Berry phase from primordial cosmological perturbation scenario. We compute this cosmological geometric phase from two possible physical situations,(1) In the absence of Bell's inequality violation and (2) In the presence of Bell's inequality violation having the contributions in the sub Hubble region ($-kτ\gg 1$)…
A rotating thin shell in a (2+1)-dimensional asymptotically AdS spacetime is studied. The spacetime exterior to the shell is the rotating BTZ spacetime and the interior is the empty spacetime with a cosmological constant. Through the Einstein equation in (2+1)-dimensions and the corresponding junction conditions we calculate the dynamical relevant quantities, namely, the rest energy-density, the pressure, and the angular momentum flux density. We also analyze the matter in a frame where its energy-momentum tensor has a perfect fluid form. In addition, we show that Machian effects, such as the …
A classical and quantum mechanical generalized second law of thermodynamics in cosmology implies constraints on the effective equation of state of the universe in the form of energy conditions, obeyed by many known cosmological solutions, and is compatible with entropy bounds which forbid certain cosmological singularities. In string cosmology the second law provides new information about the existence of non-singular solutions, and the nature of the graceful exit transition from dilaton-driven inflation.
We present a simple quantum-mechanical estimate of the cosmological constant of a Newtonian Universe. We first mimic the dynamics of a Newtonian spacetime by means of a nonrelativistic quantum mechanics for the matter contents of the Universe (baryonic and dark) within a fixed (i.e., nondynamical) Euclidean spacetime. Then we identify an operator that plays, on the matter states, a role analogous to that played by the cosmological constant. Finally we prove that there exists a quantum state for the matter fields, in which the above mentioned operator has an expectation value equal to the cosmo…
We review the most recent progress in our understanding of quantum mechanical observables in cosmology in the perturbative regime. It relies on an approach that considers them directly as functions of the data at the space-like boundary at future infinity prescinding from the explicit time evolution. It takes inspiration from the on-shell formulation of perturbative scattering amplitudes developed in the past 20 years: starting with the requirement of consistency with some fundamental principles such as causality, unitarity and locality, it provides different ways of phrasing and extracting pr…
According to Belinsky, Khalatnikov and Lifshitz, gravity near a space-like singularity reduces to a set of decoupled one-dimensional mechanical models at each point in space. We point out that these models fall into a class of conformal mechanical models first introduced by de Alfaro, Fubini and Furlan (DFF). The deformation used by DFF to render the spectrum discrete corresponds to a negative cosmological constant. The wave function of the universe is the zero-energy eigenmode of the Hamiltonian, also known as the spherical vector of the representation of the conformal group SO(1,2). A new cl…
We study solutions of the Wheeler-DeWitt equation corresponding to an S-modular invariant N=1 supergravity model and a closed homogeneous and isotropic Friedmann-Robertson-Walker spacetime. The issues of inflation and of the cosmological constant problem are addressed with the help of the relevant wave functions. We find that topological type inflation is consistent from the quantum mechanical point of view and that a solution for the cosmological constant problem along the lines of the strong CP problem naturally arises.
We construct the quantum mechanical evolution operator in the Functional Schrodinger picture - the kernel - for a scalar field in spatially homogeneous FLRW spacetimes when the field is a) free and b) coupled to a spacetime dependent source term. The essential element in the construction is the causal propagator, linked to the commutator of two Heisenberg picture scalar fields. We show that the kernels can be expressed solely in terms of the causal propagator and derivatives of the causal propagator. Furthermore, we show that our kernel reveals the standard light cone structure in FLRW spaceti…
We compute, from first principles, the quantum fluctuations about instanton saddle points of the Euclidean path integral for Einstein gravity coupled to a scalar field. The Euclidean two-point correlator is analytically continued into the Lorentzian region where it describes the quantum mechanical vacuum fluctuations in the state described by no boundary proposal initial conditions. We concentrate on the density perturbations in open inflationary universes produced from cosmological instantons, describing the differences between non-singular Coleman-De Luccia and singular Hawking-Turok instant…
Based on quantum mechanical framework for the minimal length uncertainty, we demonstrate that the generalized uncertainty principle (GUP) parameter could be best constrained by recent gravitational waves observations on one hand. On other hand this suggests modified dispersion relations (MDRs) enabling an estimation for the difference between the group velocity of gravitons and that of photons. Utilizing features of the UV/IR correspondence and the obvious similarities between GUP (including non-gravitating and gravitating impacts on Heisenberg uncertainty principle) and the discrepancy betwee…
If the potential of a scalar field, Phi, which currently provides the ``dark energy'' of the universe, has a negative minimum -M_0^4, then quantum-mechanical fluctuations could nucleate a bubble of Phi at a negative value of the potential. The bubble would expand at the speed of light. Given that no such bubble enveloped us in the past, we find that any minimum in V(Phi) must be separated from the current Phi value by more than min{1.5M_0, 0.21M_Pl}, where M_Pl is the Planck mass. We also show that vacuum decay renders a cyclic or ekpyrotic universe with M_0^4 > 10^{-10}M_Pl^4, untenable.
We consider (4+D)-dimensional Kaluza-Klein cosmological model with two scaling factors, as real, p-adic and adelic quantum mechanical one. One of the scaling factors corresponds to the D-dimensional internal space, and second one to the 4-dimensional universe. In standard quantum cosmology, i.e. over the field of real numbers R, it leads to dynamical compactification of additional dimensions and to the accelerating evolution of 4-dimensional universe. We construct corresponding $p$-adic quantum model and explore existence of its p-adic ground state. In addition, we explore evolution of this mo…
Very recently authors in [5] proposed a new Generalized Uncertainty Principle (or GUP) with a linear term in Plank length. In this Letter the effect of this GUP is studied in quantum cosmological models with dust and cosmic string as the perfect fluid. For the quantum mechanical description it is possible to find the wave packet which resulted from the superposition of the stationary wave functions of the Wheeler-deWitt equation. However the norm of the wave packets turned out to be time dependent and hence the model became non-unitary. The loss of unitarity is due to the fact that the presenc…
We consider a possibility to construct a quantum-mechanical model of spacetime, where Planck size quantum black holes act as the fundamental constituents of space and time. Spacetime is assumed to be a graph, where black holes lie on the vertices. Our model implies that area has a discrete spectrum with equal spacing. At macroscopic length scales our model reproduces Einstein's field equation with a vanishing cosmological constant as a sort of thermodynamical equation of state of spacetime and matter fields. In the low temperature limit, where most black holes are assumed to be in the ground s…
This contribution summarizes some recent work on gravitational-wave astronomy and, especially, on the generation and detection of relic gravitational waves. We begin with a brief discussion of astrophysical sources of gravitational waves that are likely to be detected first by the coming in operation laser interferometers, such as GEO, LIGO, VIRGO. Then, we proceed to relic gravitational waves emphasizing their quantum-mechanical origin and the inevitability of their existence. Combining the theory with available observations, we discuss the prospects of direct detection of relic gravitational…
It is likely that the observed large-angular-scale anisotropies in the microwave background radiation are induced by the cosmological perturbations of quantum-mechanical origin. Such perturbations are now placed in squeezed vacuum quantum states and, hence, are characterized by large variances of their amplitude. The statistical properties of the anisotropies should reflect the underlying statistics of the squeezed vacuum quantum states. The theoretical variances for the temperature angular correlation function are derived and described quantitatively. It is shown that they are indeed large. U…
We investigate the pair creation of noncommutative black holes in a background with positive cosmological constant. As a first step we derive the noncommutative geometry inspired Schwarzschild deSitter solution. By varying the mass and the cosmological constant parameters, we find several spacetimes compatible with the new solution: positive mass spacetimes admit one cosmological horizon and two, one or no black hole horizons, while negative mass spacetimes have just a cosmological horizon. These new black holes share the properties of the corresponding asymptotically flat solutions, including…
This is a brief summary of a talk delivered at the Special Session of the Physical Sciences Division of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, 25 May 2011. The meeting was devoted to the 90-th anniversary of A. D. Sakharov. The focus of this contribution is on the standing-wave pattern of quantum-mechanically generated metric (gravitational field) perturbations as the origin of subsequent Sakharov oscillations in the matter power spectrum. Other related phenomena, particularly in the area of gravitational waves, and their observational significance are also discussed.
The quantum cosmological version of the multidimensional Einstein-Yang-Mills model in a $R \times S^3 \times S^d$ topology is studied in the framework of the Hartle-Hawking proposal. In contrast to previous work in the literature, we consider Yang-Mills field configurations with non-vanishing time-dependent components in both $S^3$ and $S^d$ spaces. We obtain stable compactifying solutions that do correspond to extrema of the Hartle-Hawking wave function of the Universe. Subsequently, we also show that the regions where 4-dimensional metric behaves classically or quantum mechanically (i.e. reg…
Arrows of time - thermodynamical, cosmological, electromagnetic, quantum mechanical, psychological - are basic properties of Nature. For a quantum system-bath closed system the de-correlated initial conditions and no-memory (Markovian) dynamics are outlined as necessary conditions for the appearance of the thermodynamical arrow. The emergence of the arrow for the system evolving according to non-unitary dynamics due to the presence of the bath, then, is a result of limited observability, and we conjecture the arrow in the observable Universe as determined by the dark sector acting as a bath. T…
This is the second paper in a series of four in which we use space adiabatic methods in order to incorporate backreactions among the homogeneous and between the homogeneous and inhomogeneous degrees of freedom in quantum cosmological perturbation theory. The purpose of the present paper is twofold. On the one hand, it illustrates the formalism of space adiabatic perturbation theory (SAPT) for two simple quantum mechanical toy models. On the other, it proves the main point, namely that backreactions lead to additional correction terms in effective Hamiltonians that one would otherwise neglect i…
Levi-Civita spacetimes have classical naked singularities. They also have quantum singularities. Quantum singularities in general relativistic spacetimes are determined by the behavior of quantum test particles. A static spacetime is said to be quantum mechanically singular if the spatial portion of the wave operator is not essentially self-adjoint on a $C_{0}^{\infty}$ domain in $L^{2}$, a Hilbert space of square integrable functions. Here we summarize how Weyl's limit point-limit circle criterion can be used to determine whether a wave operator is essentially self-adjoint and how this test c…
We investigate the Universe at the late stage of its evolution and inside the cell of uniformity 150-370 Mpc. We consider the Universe to be filled at these scales with dust like matter, a minimally coupled Galileon field and radiation. We use the mechanical approach. Therefore, the peculiar velocities of the inhomogeneities as well as the fluctuations of the other perfect fluids can be considered nonrelativistic. Such fluids are said to be coupled because they are concentrated around the inhomogeneities. We investigate the conditions under which the physical Galileon field, i.e. compatible wi…
A quantum mechanical model for an N + 1 dimensional universe arising from a quantum fluctuation is outlined. (3 + 1) dimensions are a closed infinitely-expanding universe and the remaining N - 3 dimensions are compact. The (3 + 1) non-compact dimensions are modeled by quantizing a canonical Hamiltonian description of a homogeneous isotropic universe. It is assumed gravity and the strong-electro-weak (SEW) forces had equal strength in the initial state. Inflation occurred when the compact N -3 dimensional space collapsed after a quantum transition from the initial state of the univers, during i…
We argue that our recent success in using our resummed quantum gravity approach to Einstein's general theory of relativity, in the context of the Planck scale cosmology formulation of Bonanno and Reuter, to estimate the value of the cosmological constant Λsupports the use of quantum mechanical consistency requirements to constrain the main uncertainty in that very promising result. This main uncertainty, which is due to the uncertainty in the value of the time t_{\text{tr}} at which the transition from the Planck scale cosmology to the FRW model occurs, is shown to be reduced, by requiring con…
