Alternative scenarios to the Big Bang singularity have been subject of intense research for several decades by now. Most popular in this sense have been frameworks were such singularity is replaced by a bounce around some minimal cosmological volume or by some early quantum phase. This latter scenario was devised a long time ago and referred as an "emergent universe" (in the sense that our universe emerged from a constant volume quantum phase). We show here that within an improved framework of canonical quantum gravity (the so called Quantum Reduced Loop Gravity) the Friedmann equations for cosmology are modified in such a way to replace the big bang singularity with a short bounce preceded by a metastable quantum phase in which the volume of the universe oscillates between a series of local maxima and minima. We call this hybrid scenario an "emergentbouncing universe" since after a pure oscillating quantum phase the classical Friedmann spacetime emerges. Perspective developments and possible tests of this scenario are discussed in the end.

We introduce a new regularization scheme for Quantum Cosmology in Loop Quantum Gravity (LQG) using the tools of Quantum Reduced Loop Gravity (QRLG). It is obtained considering density matrices for superposition of graphs based on statistical countings of microstates compatible with macroscopic configurations. We call this procedure statistical regularization scheme. In particular, we show how the µ0 andμ schemes introduced in Loop Quantum Cosmology (LQC) emerge with specific choices of density matrices. Within this new scheme we compute effective Hamiltonians suitable to describe quantum corrected Friedmann and Bianchi I universes and their leading orders coincide with the corresponding effective LQC Hamiltonians in theμ scheme. We compute the next to the leading orders corrections and numerical investigation of the resulting dynamics shows evidence for the emergent-bouncing universe scenario to be a general property of the isotropic sector of QRLG. 7 FLRW from the Bianchi I reduced density matrix 17 8 FLRW effective dynamics: numerical study 17 9 Conclusions 20

Quantum reduced loop gravity is designed to consistently study symmetry reduced systems within the loop quantum gravity framework. In particular, it bridges the gap between the effective cosmological models of loop quantum cosmology and the full theory, addressing the dynamics before the minisuperspace reduction. This mostly preserves the graph structure and SU(2) quantum numbers.In this article, we study the phenomenological consequences of the isotropic sector of the theory, the so-called emergent bouncing universe model. In particular, the parameter space is scanned and we show that the number of inflationary e-folds is almost always higher than the observational lower bound. We also compute the primordial tensor power spectrum and study its sensitivity upon the fundamental parameters used in the model.

The effective quantum dynamics of Bianchi I spacetime is addressed within the statistical regularization scheme in Quantum Reduced Loop Gravity. The case of a minimally coupled massless scalar field is studied and compared with the effectiveμ−Loop Quantum Cosmology. The dynamics provided by the two approaches match in the semiclassical limit but differ significantly after the bounces. Analytical and numerical inspections show that energy density, expansion scalar and shear are bounded also in Quantum Reduced Loop Gravity and the classical singularity is resolved for generic initial conditions in all spatial directions.