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Session 38 - Modeling & Numerical Methods.
Display session, Wednesday, June 11
South Main Hall,
It is well established that particle production due to quantized fields will occur whenever the universe is expanding or contracting very rapidly, which it does when its size is small. We show that particle production in the early universe causes the universe to expand to a greater maximum size upon each cycle. In this way particle production in an oscillating universe provides a natural solution to the flatness problem. This is similar but not identical to the effect of entropy generation in an oscillating universe, which can also be used to solve the flatness problem. We illustrate the effect of particle production on the expansion of an oscillating universe by considering a simple model in which the universe contains classical radiation and a massive conformally coupled scalar field. This model is completely self-consistent in that the oscillation and the particle production occur naturally rather than being put in by hand.