A Brief Overview of Results about Uniqueness of the Quantization in Cosmology

TL;DR

This review discusses recent criteria for ensuring the uniqueness of quantization in cosmological models, focusing on symmetry representations, invariance, and their implications for different quantum cosmology approaches.

Contribution

It provides a unified overview of various criteria for quantization uniqueness in cosmology, including symmetry and invariance considerations across different models.

Findings

Symmetry groups influence quantization uniqueness.

Invariance requirements can restrict physically interesting quantizations.

A unified perspective connects different approaches in quantum cosmology.

Abstract

The purpose of this review is to provide a brief overview of some recent conceptual developments about possible criteria to guarantee the uniqueness of the quantization in a variety of situations that are found in cosmological systems. These criteria impose some conditions on the representation of a group of physically relevant linear transformations. Generally, this group contains any existing symmetry of the spatial sections. These symmetries may or may not be sufficient for the purpose of uniqueness and may have to be complemented with other remaining symmetries that affect the time direction, or with dynamical transformations that in fact are not symmetries. We discuss the extent to which a unitary implementation of the resulting group suffices to fix the quantization, a demand that can be seen as a weaker version of the requirement of invariance. In particular, a strict invariance under certain transformations may eliminate some physically interesting possibilities in the passage to the quantum theory. This is the first review in which this unified perspective is adopted to discuss otherwise rather different uniqueness criteria proposed either in homogeneous loop quantum cosmology or in the Fock quantization of inhomogeneous cosmologies.