The Universe as a driven quantum system: Unbounded heating in cyclic cosmologies

Abstract

The Hamiltonian of an evolving Universe is shown to be formally equivalent to that of a driven quantum system, whose driving follows from the temporal dependence of the spacetime metric. This analogy allows insights from the field of driven quantum systems to be applied to cosmological settings. In particular, it is shown that periodic cyclic cosmologies are generically prohibited (except under certain limiting constraints) due to their correspondence with periodically-driven quantum systems (which are typically expected to experience unbounded heating in the infinite future). This result highlights how future work on non-periodically-driven quantum systems is required to fully describe the dynamics of more general cyclic cosmologies (for which a qualitative picture is briefly discussed).