Applications of a New Proposal for Solving the "Problem of Time" to Some Simple Quantum Cosmological Models

TL;DR

This paper applies a new approach to defining states and observables in quantum gravity to simple models, demonstrating its advantages over traditional methods and exploring its implications for quantum cosmology and the Wheeler-DeWitt equation.

Contribution

It introduces a novel proposal for quantum gravity that yields consistent dynamics independent of slicing choices and applies it to quantum cosmological models, including Bianchi types.

Findings

Dynamics are slicing-independent during intermediate times.

Quantum states can closely follow classical solutions during expansion.

Scalar field becomes frozen after maximum expansion.

Abstract

We apply a recent proposal for defining states and observables in quantum gravity to simple models. First, we consider a Klein-Gordon particle in an ex- ternal potential in Minkowski space and compare our proposal to the theory ob- tained by deparametrizing with respect to a time slicing prior to quantiza- tion. We show explicitly that the dynamics of the deparametrization approach depends on the time slicing. Our proposal yields a dynamics independent of the choice of time slicing at intermediate times but after the potential is turned off, the dynamics does not return to the free particle dynamics. Next we apply our proposal to the closed Robertson-Walker quantum cosmology with a massless scalar field with the size of the universe as our time variable, so the only dynamical variable is the scalar field. We show that the resulting theory has the semi-classical behavior up to the classical turning point from expansion to contraction, i.e., given a classical solution which expands for much longer than the Planck time, there is a quantum state whose dynamical evolution closely approximates this classical solution during the expansion. However, when the "time" gets larger than the classical maximum, the scalar field be- comes "frozen" at its value at the maximum expansion. We also obtain similar results in the Taub model. In an Appendix we derive the form of the Wheeler- DeWitt equation for the Bianchi models by performing a proper quantum reduc- tion of the momentum constraints; this equation differs from the usual one ob- tained by solving the momentum constraints classically, prior to quantization.