Paper detail

Quantum effects near future singularities

General relativity allows a variety of future singularities to occur in the evolution of the universe. At these future singularities, the universe will end in a singular state after a finite proper time and geometrical invariants of the space time will diverge. One question that naturally arises with respect to these cosmological scenarios is the following: can quantum effects lead to the avoidance of these future singularities? We analyze this problem considering massless and conformally coupled scalar fields in an isotropic and homogeneous background leading to future singularities. It is shown that near strong, big rip-type singularities, with violation of the energy conditions, the quantum effects are very important, while near some milder classes of singularity like the sudden singularity, which preserve the energy conditions, quantum effects are irrelevant.