Completely regular quantum stress tensor with w<-1
- Department of Physics, Koc University, 34450 Sariyer Istanbul (Turkey)
For many quantum field theory computations in cosmology it is not possible to use the flat space trick of obtaining full, interacting states by evolving free states over infinite times. State wave functionals must be specified at finite times and, although the free states suffice to obtain the lowest order effects, higher order corrections necessarily involve changes of the initial state. Failing to correctly change the initial state can result in effective field equations which diverge on the initial value surface, or which contain tedious sums of terms that redshift like inverse powers of the scale factor. In this paper we verify a conjecture from 2004 that the lowest order initial state correction can indeed absorb the initial value divergences and all the redshifting terms of the two-loop expectation value (in free, Bunch-Davies vacuum) of the stress tensor of a massless, minimally coupled scalar with a quartic self-interaction on a nondynamical de Sitter background.
- OSTI ID:
- 21409041
- Journal Information:
- Physical Review. D, Particles Fields, Vol. 81, Issue 2; Other Information: DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevD.81.023508; (c) 2010 The American Physical Society; ISSN 0556-2821
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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Related Subjects
71 CLASSICAL AND QUANTUM MECHANICS
GENERAL PHYSICS
CALCULATION METHODS
CORRECTIONS
COSMOLOGY
DE SITTER SPACE
EXPECTATION VALUE
FIELD EQUATIONS
INTERACTIONS
QUANTUM FIELD THEORY
QUANTUM OPERATORS
RED SHIFT
SURFACES
EQUATIONS
FIELD THEORIES
MATHEMATICAL OPERATORS
MATHEMATICAL SPACE
SPACE