MG11 
Talk detail
 

 Participant 

Institution

Session

Talk

Abstract

Unitary Quantization of the Gowdy $T^3$ Cosmology

We analyze the quantization of the linearly polarized Gowdy spacetimes with the spatial topology of a three-torus. The physical, local degrees of freedom of this cosmological system are described by a scalar field that is subject to a Klein-Gordon type equation in an auxiliary background. We show that a convenient choice of the basic scalar field renders this background static. We quantize the Gowdy model by means of a Fock quantization of the scalar field, and prove that the evolution obtained in this way is unitary. This contrasts with previous quantizations proposed for the Gowdy cosmology, whose dynamics does not admit a unitary implementation. In this sense, our quantization provides the first consistent quantum description of a cosmological model with an infinite number of physical degrees of freedom.