On the relevance of quantum corrections to the matter stress-energy tensor in eternally expanding universes

Abstract

We study a toy-model of continuous infinite expansion of space-time with the flat start. We use as the gravitational background a conformaly flat metric with an exponentially growing factor in conformal time. We aim to clarify some properties of quantum fields in such a gravitational background. In particular, we calculate one-loop corrections to the Keldysh propagator to verify the fact of secular growth of the occupation number and anomalous quantum average in the massless scalar field theory with selfinteractions. We perform the calculation in arbitrary dimensions with the use of the Schwinger-Keldysh technique. We get a secular growth which is not of a kinetic type. We provide some results for the case of generic interaction $\frac{\lambda}{b!}\phi^b$.Comment: 21 pages, 2 figure