Particle creation and non-adiabatic transitions in quantum cosmology

The aim of this paper is to compute transition amplitudes in quantum cosmology. To this end, we apply a double adiabatic development to the solutions of the Wheeler-DeWitt equation. We work in mini-superspace wherein gravity is described by the scale factor a. The first development consists in working with instantaneous eigenstates (i.e. defined at fixed a) of the matter Hamiltonian. The second development is applied to the gravitational part of the wave function and generalizes the usual WKB approximation, We then obtain an exact equation which replaces the Wheeler-DeWitt equation and determines the evolution, i.e. the dependence in a, of the coefficients of this double expansion. When working in the gravitational adiabatic approximation, the simplified equation delivers the unitary evolution of transition amplitudes occurring among instantaneous eigenstates. Upon abandoning this approximation, one finds that there is an additional coupling among matter states living in expanding and contracting universes. Moreover one has to face also the Klein paradox, i.e. the generation of backward waves from an initially forward wave. The interpretation and the consequences of these unusual features are only sketched in the present paper. The formalism we develop is illustrated by the examples of pair creation and radiative transitions. In particular we analyze when and how the above-mentioned unitary evolution coincides with the Schrodinger evolution for these examples. (C) 1998 Published by Elsevier Science B.V.