2012/01/05 by John D. Barrow, Barrow, John D., Antonio B. Batista +7
Physics and Astronomy · #Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics (astro-ph.CO) #FOS: Physical sciences #General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology (gr-qc) #High Energy Physics - Theory (hep-th) #astro-ph.CO #gr-qc #hep-th
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1201.1138
Latex file, 16 pages. Proceedings of Primeira Reuniao Argentino-Brasileira de Gravitacao, Astrofisica e Cosmologia, 4-8 october 2011, Foz de Iguacu, Brasil. References added and reordered
arxiv created 2012/01/09 · arxiv updated 2012/07/06
General relativity allows a variety of future singularities to occur in the evolution of the universe. At these future singularities, the universe will end in a singular state after a finite proper time and geometrical invariants of the space time will diverge. One question that naturally arises with respect to these cosmological scenarios is the following: can quantum effects lead to the avoidance of these future singularities? We analyze this problem considering massless and conformally coupled scalar fields in an isotropic and homogeneous background leading to future singularities. It is shown that near strong, big rip-type singularities, with violation of the energy conditions, the quantum effects are very important, while near some milder classes of singularity like the sudden singularity, which preserve the energy conditions, quantum effects are irrelevant.