Classical and Quantum Dispersion in Robertson-Walker Cosmologies

The instability of world lines in Robertson-Walker universes of negative spatial curvature is investigated. A probabilistic description of this instability, similar to the Liouville equation, is developed, but in a manifestly covariant, non-Hamiltonian form. To achieve this the concept of a horospherical geodesic flow of expanding bundles of parallel world lines is introduced. An invariant measure and a covariant evolution equation for the probability density on which this flow acts is constructed. The orthogonal surfaces to these bundles of trajectories are horospheres, closed surfaces in three-space, touching the boundary at infinity of hyperbolic space, where the flow lines emerge. These horospheres are just the wave fronts of spherical waves, which constitute a complete set of eigenfunctions of the Klein-Gordon equation. This fact suggests that the evolution of the quantum mechanical density with the classical one be compared, and asymptotic identity in the asymptotically flat region is found. This leads, furthermore, to the study of the time behavior of the dispersion of the energy and the coordinates and the energy-time uncertainty relation, and identity in the late stage of the cosmic evolution is again found. In an example it is finally demonstrated that this identity can persist in the early phase of the expansion with a rapidly varying scale factor, provided the fields are conformally coupled to the curvature.