Backreactions in Quantum Cosmological Perturbation Theory

Abstract

Cosmological perturbation theory has a long tradition for describing the early phases of the Universe. As the observations of the CMB radiation suggest, it is reasonable, at least as a first approximation, to implement cosmological inhomogeneities as small perturbations around homogeneous and isotropic FRW solutions. In these approaches, backreactions between the inhomogeneities and the background are usually neglected. There is an ongoing debate about how and to which extend these backreactions affect the large scale structure of the Universe. Even at a purely classical level, there is no conclusive answer to this question yet.

In my talk, I am going to present a new systematic formalism for implementing backreactions in cosmological perturbation theory, in which both, the perturbations and the homogeneous degrees of freedom are considered as quantum degrees of freedom. As a more realistic theory of quantum fields on quantum cosmological space times, it can help to close the gap between a full theory of quantum gravity and symmetry-reduced models of quantum cosmology, and to confront these theories with observations. Our results show that quantum backreactions imply non-trivial corrections that are potentially phenomenologically significant.