Third Quantization and Quantum Cosmology.

My thesis consists of three separate parts. Part one consists of a study of CP violation in the Kaon decay: K to pi pi gamma . To study the short distance contribution to the matrix element we developed an operator expansion for the effective Hamiltonian. An effective s to dgamma vertex arises through operator mixing. We evaluated several two-loop graphs in order to obtain the coefficient of this operator. We studied the long distance contributions to the matrix element and demonstrated that this was the dominant contribution. This explained why the polarization of the emitted photon is primarily of the magnetic type. Part two of my thesis involves the treatment of string theory at finite temperature. We introduced finite temperature into string theory by compactifying time on a twisted torus of radius beta = 1/kT, the reciprical of the temperature. The twisted torus takes into account the different thermal properties of bosons and fermions. We computed the one-loop vacuum amplitude Lambda(beta) on a twisted torus which is manifestly modular invariant. We found that lnZ(beta) = -betaVLambda (beta) where Z(beta) is the partition function and V the volume of the system. We computed the function sigma(E) which counts the number of multi-string states of total energy E by taking the inverse Laplace transform of Z( beta). We also studied the effect of finite temperature on the effective potentials which determine a string theory's compactification. The third part of my thesis involved the Wheeler DeWitt equation and a new interpretation of quantum cosmology. We examined a proposal by DeWitt for the normalization of solutions to the Wheeler-DeWitt equation. We avoided negative probability problems with this proposal by reinterpreting the Wheeler-DeWitt wave function as a second quantized field. As the arguments of the Wheeler-DeWitt wave functional are second quantized fields this represented a third quantization. We developed a mode decomposition for the third quantized field and constructed multi-universe states. We generalized the notion of a vertex operator to consider a universe being emitted during the propagation of another universe. We also discussed universe creation in the context of third quantization. Finally we applied third quantization to the two dimensional gravity used in string theory.