A First-Quantized Formalism for Cosmological Particle Production

Given suitable boundary conditions, we show that the initial state and the amount of particle production in a cosmological spacetime are encoded in the Feynman propagator. The propagator can be represented in terms of a particle path integral in an auxiliary spacetime, and particle production can be extracted from the auxiliary propagator. This provides a first-quantized formalism for computing cosmological particle production which, unlike conventional Bogolubov transformations, may be amenable to a string-theoretic generalization.