We are now ready to go back to curved spacetime in the IN/OUT formalism!
We have
Indeed,
where when we get particles from gravity! The particle density reads
For instance, in a Friedmann-Robertson-Walker metric (FRW universe) we obtain
where is the scale factor and
is the energy of the mode k. The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle (HUP) implies (heuristically) that
An interesting consequence of all this crazy stuff is that with massless particles ( ) and a de Sitter (dS) spacetime we get virtual particles produced by this effect or alternatively
is finite!
The IN/OUT asymptotically stationary phase implies gravitational particle creation! The Bogoliubov coefficients are understood in the following sense:
contains “particles” (quasiparticles to be more precise) that are related to a set of normal modes. In fact, the complete set of Bogoliubov coefficients satisfy certain relations:
for bosons and
for fermions. The quantum analogue of this coefficients are the scattering problem over a potential barrier (they can be understood as “tunneling amplitudes” somehow).
In flat FRW universes, we get
The Klein-Gordon field has solutions (in curved spacetime!):
with
normalization. The time dependent simple harmonic oscillator with variable
satisfy
and where is the minimal coupling case, and
determines the conformal coupling case in D=4. Furthermore,
and thus
The particle number uncertainty due to the particle creation can be also calculated:
It has a minimum when
and
so
Fluctuations in the particle number are ALWAYS non zero if there is particle creation! The proof is easy to understand:
There is a nice relationship between the “squeezed” states and the vacuum in this formalism:
If is a squeezed state respect to
, then
The conformal coupling is special: massless case implies that there is no particle creation (indeed, conformal field theories has no notion of particle theirselves!).
When we have a smooth expansion, in the massive case , then
is the conformal case. Moreover, the solutions to the EOM can be easily found by common procedures of differential equations. Thus, we have
with
has two solutions with frequencies
and
!
A well known example in the literature is when corresponds to the case
when
Thus,
and it corresponds to the adiabatic expansion case.
With a step function expansion (), we get
and it corresponds to the “sudden approximation”. The modes read then, in this “sudden” case,
and
if . The particle number, the critical frequency and the variation of
correspond respectively to
After all these rudimentary facts, we can understand two of the most celebrated phenomena in curved spacetime QFT:
1) The Unruh effect (or the relativity of vacuum in curved spacetime QFT).
2) The Hawking effect (particle creation in the surrounding of black holes).
These two effects will be covered in my next posts from a very elementary viewpoint!
See you in the next TSOR posts!