Effects of Quantized Scalar Fields in Cosmological Spacetimes with Big Rip Singularities

Understand

Effects of quantized free scalar fields in cosmological spacetimes with Big Rip singularities are investigated.

• The energy densities for these fields are computed at late times when the expansion is very rapid.
• For the massless minimally coupled field it is shown that an attractor state exists in the sense that, for a large class of states, the energy density of the field asymptotically approaches the energy density it would have if it was in the attractor state.
• Results of numerical computations of the energy density for the massless minimally coupled field and for massive fields with minimal and conformal coupling to the scalar curvature are presented.