# Fermions in Hybrid Loop Quantum Cosmology

## TL;DR

This paper develops a quantum framework for primordial fermion perturbations in hybrid Loop Quantum Cosmology, demonstrating unitary evolution and analyzing fermion-geometry interactions within a cosmological setting.

## Contribution

It introduces a novel quantization approach for fermion perturbations in hybrid LQC, combining loop and Fock methods, and establishes their unitary evolution in a quantum cosmological model.

## Key findings

- Fermion perturbations evolve unitarily in the quantum cosmological background.
- The evolved fermion vacuum is an exact solution of the Schrödinger equation.
- Fermions couple to quantum moments of the homogeneous geometry.

## Abstract

This work pioneers the quantization of primordial fermion perturbations in hybrid Loop Quantum Cosmology (LQC). We consider a Dirac field coupled to a spatially flat, homogeneous, and isotropic cosmology, sourced by a scalar inflaton, and treat the Dirac field as a perturbation. We describe the inhomogeneities of this field in terms of creation and annihilation variables, chosen to admit a unitary evolution if the Dirac fermion were treated as a test field. Considering instead the full system, we truncate its action at quadratic perturbative order and construct a canonical formulation. In particular this implies that, in the global Hamiltonian constraint of the model, the contribution of the homogeneous sector is corrected with a quadratic perturbative term. We then adopt the hybrid LQC approach to quantize the full model, combining the loop representation of the homogeneous geometry with the Fock quantization of the inhomogeneities. We assume a Born-Oppenheimer ansatz for physical states and show how to obtain a Schr\"odinger equation for the quantum evolution of the perturbations, where the role of time is played by the homogeneous inflaton. We prove that the resulting quantum evolution of the Dirac field is indeed unitary, despite the fact that the underlying homogeneous geometry has been quantized as well. Remarkably, in such evolution, the fermion field couples to an infinite sequence of quantum moments of the homogeneous geometry. Moreover, the evolved Fock vacuum of our fermion perturbations is shown to be an exact solution of the Schr\"odinger equation. Finally, we discuss in detail the quantum backreaction that the fermion field introduces in the global Hamiltonian constraint. For completeness, our quantum study includes since the beginning (gauge-invariant) scalar and tensor perturbations, that were studied in previous works.