The Schrödinger wave functional and vacuum states in curved spacetime Original Research Article

New developments in the Schrödinger picture description of vacuum states in curved spacetime are presented. General solutions for the vacuum wave functional are given for both static and dynamic (Bianchi type I) spacetimes and for conformally static spacetimes of Robertson-Walker type. The formalism is illustrated for a simple ‘cosmological’ model with a time-dependent metric and the phenomenon of particle creation is related to a special form of the kernel in the vacuum wave functional.