# Particle identity in conformal cyclic cosmology

I have a few questions about Penrose's conformal cyclic cosmology from a lay perspective.

1. What happens to each particle? The picture of the far future of an aeon in CCC is an exponentially expanding spacetime with only massless particles (mostly photons and gravitons, possibly plus other imagined particles to deal with charge conservation and such). Do these individual particles cross into the next aeon with a meaningfully preserved identity?

2. Does the number of particles change? Looking from the beginning of an aeon to the end, we start with a small number $$N_0$$ of high energy massless particles (low entropy) and end with a very large number $$N_1 >> N_0$$ of low energy particles (high entropy). If the answer of (1) is that particle identity is preserved, when we continue across to the next aeon we'd have $$N_1$$ high energy particles. The end of that aeon would then have $$N_2 >> N_1$$ low energy particles. Would that mean we can treat the absolute entropy as increasing aeon over aeon?

3. Per-particle null cones: At the end of an aeon, my intuition would be that the number of particles becomes a constant. Moreover, the particles should become very well separated from each other due to the expansion of space, and indeed would end up with nonoverlapping null cones. But when we continue on to the next aeon the high energy particles near the Big Bang are interacting wildly, and in particular their null cones must intersect. This seems inconsistent, so which step in the line of reasoning is wrong?