Silvia Pla Garcia: How can quantum tunnelling induce a cosmological bounce?

Friday 12 May 2023, 12:30 → 14:00 Europe/London

Niels Bohr Seminar Room (Schuster)

In this talk, I will present a novel mechanism to induce a cosmological bounce that is purely generated by quantum fluctuations without the need for exotic matter or modified gravity. In the first part of the talk, I will give a gentle introduction to quantum field theory in curved spacetimes. In the second part, I will explain how this quantum-induced bounce emerges in this context when we allow a scalar field on a flat FLRW universe to tunnel between two degenerate minima.

 

The seminar will be given in person in Niels Bohr, Schuster.