Quantum nature of the big bang.

By Abhay Ashtekar, T. Pawłowski, Parampreet Singh. Physical Review Letters, 2006

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Some long-standing issues concerning the quantum nature of the big bang are resolved in the context of homogeneous isotropic models with a scalar field. Specifically, the known results on the resolution of the big-bang singularity in loop quantum cosmology are significantly extended as follows: (i) the scalar field is shown to serve as an internal clock, thereby providing a detailed realization of the "emergent time" idea; (ii) the physical Hilbert space, Dirac observables, and semiclassical states are constructed rigorously; (iii) the Hamiltonian constraint is solved numerically to show that the big bang is replaced by a big bounce. Thanks to the nonperturbative, background independent methods, unlike in other approaches the quantum evolution is deterministic across the deep Planck regime.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics, Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d4d7d1b70c2e20f2647a1d047a79d3b42e098b05

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Citations in the corpus

FUNDAMENTAL STRUCTURE OF LOOP QUANTUM GRAVITY (2005, methodology): “ise naturally and exit gracefully due to the quantum geometry eﬀect [47][61]. Recently, semiclassical states are used to understand the quantum evolution of the universe across the deep Planck regime [29]. It turns out that the classical big bang is replaced by a quantum big bounce [30][31]. The pre”
Loop quantum cosmology: an overview (2008, methodology): “In the first papers [20, 33] on the bounce, the analysis began with the choice N = 1 of the lapse function.”
Quantum Nature of the Big Bang: Improved dynamics (2006, methodology): “(For a brief summary of results, see [2].”
Towards spinfoam cosmology (2010, background): “[45] Abhay Ashtekar, Tomasz Pawlowski, and Parampreet Singh.”
Quantum nature of the big bang: An analytical and numerical investigation (2006, background): “A brief summary of arguments leading to this conclusion appeared in [15].”
Loop Quantum Cosmology (2005, background): “This has provided the first geometrical pictures of a bouncing wave function [25].”
Extension of the quantum theory of cosmological perturbations to the Planck era (2012, background): “[11] A.”
Inflationary Cosmology in Modified Gravity Theories (2015, methodology): “For this purpose, we use the Hamiltonian with the general holonomy corrections [35,93].”
Loop quantum cosmology: a status report (2011, background): “23 1395 (2006) [51] A.”
The pre-inflationary dynamics of loop quantum cosmology: confronting quantum gravity with observations (2012, background): “For further details on construction of such states, see [22].”