Colloquium: Dr. Hideki Maeda

Fri. Jul. 17 03:30 PM - Fri. Jul. 17 04:30 PM
Location: 2M74

Dr. Hideki Maeda, Professor at Hokkai-Gakuen University in Sapporo, Japan

All are welcome to join the Physics department on Friday, July 17th, 2015, at 3:30pm for this special summer lecture from Dr. Maeda, hosted in partnership with the Winnipeg Institute for Theoretical Physics.

Unitary Evolution of the Quantum Universe with a Brown-Kuchar Dust

We study the time evolution of a wave function for the Friedmann-Lemaitre-Robertson-Walker universe governed by the Wheeler-DeWitt equation in both analytic and numerical methods. We consider a Brown-Kuchar dust as a matter field in order to introduce a "clock" in quantum cosmology and adopt the Laplace-Beltrami operator-ordering. The Hamiltonian operator admits an infinite number of self-adjoint extensions corresponding to a one-parameter family of boundary conditions at the origin in the minisuperspace. For any value of the extension parameter in the boundary condition, the evolution of a wave function is unitary and the classical initial singularity is avoided and replaced by the big bounce in the quantum system. It is verified that the expectation value of the spatial volume of the universe obeys the classical time evolution in the late time.