Quantum healing of classical singularities in power-law spacetimes
arXiv:gr-qc/0701149 · doi:10.1088/0264-9381/24/13/014
Abstract
We study a broad class of spacetimes whose metric coefficients reduce to powers of a radius r in the limit of small r. Among these four-parameter "power-law" metrics we identify those parameters for which the spacetimes have classical singularities as r approaches 0. We show that a large set of such classically singular spacetimes is nevertheless nonsingular quantum mechanically, in that the Hamiltonian operator is essentially self-adjoint, so that the evolution of quantum wave packets lacks the ambiguity associated with scattering off singularities. Using these metrics, the broadest class yet studied to compare classical with quantum singularities, we explore the physical reasons why some that are singular classically are "healed" quantum mechanically, while others are not. We show that most (but not all) of the remaining quantum-mechanically singular spacetimes can be excluded if either the weak energy condition or the dominant energy condition is invoked, and we briefly discuss the effect of this work on the strong cosmic censorship hypothesis.
14 pages, 1 figure; extensive revisions
References in corpus (5)
Cited by in corpus (8)
- Quantum Singularities Around a Global Monopole
- Quantum singularities in static and conformally static space-times
- Quantum singularities in spherically symmetric, conformally static spacetimes
- Quantum probes of timelike naked singularities in dimensional power - law spacetimes
- Scalar Polynomial Singularities in Power-Law Spacetimes
- Quantum Probe of Hořava-Lifshitz Gravity
- Classical and quantum properties of a 2-sphere singularity
- Quantum Probe of Time-like Naked Singularities for Electrically and Magnetically Charged Black Holes in a Model of Nonlinear Electrodynamics