Perturbative quantum damping of cosmological expansion

Abstract

Perturbative quantum gravity in the framework of the Schwinger-Keldysh formalism is applied to compute lowest-order corrections to the actual expansion of the Universe described in terms of the spatially flat Friedman-Lematre-Robertson-Walker solution. The classical metric is approximated by a third order polynomial perturbation around the Minkowski metric. It is shown that the quantum contribution to the classical expansion, although extremely small, has damping properties (quantum friction), i.e. it slows down the expansion.