Ilya Vilensky, Florida Atlantic University
Title: The unique form of dynamics in LQC
PDF of the talk (0.5M)
Audio+Slides [.mp4 11MB]
By Jorge Pullin, LSU
Loop quantum cosmology is the application of ideas of loop quantum gravity to the context of cosmology, where one freezes most degrees of freedom and studies just a few large scale ones, like the volume of the universe or its anisotropy. Loop quantum cosmology is not "derived" from loop quantum gravity, in the sense of choosing in the full theory quantum states that are very symmetric with only a few degrees of freedom and study their evolution. That is at the moment, too complicated. In loop quantum cosmology one first freezes the degrees of freedom one wishes to ignore and then proceeds to quantize the remaining ones. It is not clear that this coincides with "quantizing and then freezing". It is therefore important to run cross checks to make sure that at least within the approximation considered, things are consistent.
In spite of the enormous simplification one obtains when one first freezes most degrees of freedom and then quantizes, there are still quite a few ambiguities in the quantization process. This talk showed in the example of anisotropic universes, how imposing the residual symmetries and left after freezing most degrees of freedom, and demanding that the correct classical limit follow, allows to cut down on the number of ambiguities present. This increases the confidence in results previously obtained in loop quantum cosmology, some of which may have observable implications for the anisotropies of the cosmic microwave background radiation.
