Cosmological particle production in emergent rainbow spacetimes

Abstract

We investigate cosmological particle production in spacetimes where Lorentz invariance emerges in the infrared limit, but is explicitly broken in the ultraviolet regime. Thus these models are similar to many (but not all) models of quantum gravity, where a breakdown of Lorentz invariance is expected for ultraviolet physics around the Planck/string scale. Our specific model focuses on the boost subgroup that supports CPT invariance and results in a momentum-dependent dispersion relation. Motivated by previous studies on spacetimes emerging from a microscopic substrate, we show how these modifications naturally lead to momentum-dependent rainbow metrics. Firstly, we investigate the possibility of reproducing cosmological particle production in spacetimes emerging from real Bose gases. Several papers have been written on the analogy between the kinematics of linearized perturbations in Bose–Einstein condensates and effective curved-spacetime quantum field theory. Recently we have studied the influence of nonperturbative ultraviolet corrections in time-dependent analog spacetimes, leading to momentum-dependent emergent rainbow spacetimes. We show that models involving a time-dependent microscopic interaction are suitable for mimicking quantum effects in FRW spacetimes. Within certain limits the analogy is sufficiently good to simulate relativistic quantum field theory in time-dependent classical backgrounds, and the quantum effects are approximately robust against the model-dependent modifications. Secondly, we analyze how significantly the particle production process deviates from the common picture. While very low-energy modes do not see the difference at all, some modes ‘re-enter the Hubble horizon’ during the inflationary epoch, and extreme ultraviolet modes are completely insensitive to the expansion. The analysis outlined here, because it is nonperturbative in the rainbow metric, exhibits features that cannot be extracted simply from the standard perturbative modification of particle dispersion relations. However, we also show how the final result, after many e-foldings, will approach a time-independent exponentially decaying particle spectrum.