Sailing through the big crunch-big bang transition

Itzhak Bars, Paul Steinhardt, Neil Turok

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

46 Scopus citations

Abstract

In a recent series of papers, we have shown that theories with scalar fields coupled to gravity (e.g., the standard model) can be lifted to a Weyl-invariant equivalent theory in which it is possible to unambiguously trace the classical cosmological evolution through the transition from big crunch to big bang. The key was identifying a sufficient number of finite, Weyl-invariant conserved quantities to uniquely match the fundamental cosmological degrees of freedom across the transition. In doing so we had to account for the well-known fact that many Weyl-invariant quantities diverge at the crunch and bang. Recently, some authors rediscovered a few of these divergences and concluded based on their existence alone that the theories cannot be geodesically complete. In this paper, we show that this conclusion is invalid. Using conserved quantities we explicitly construct the complete set of geodesics and show that they pass continuously through the big crunch-big bang transition.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Article number061302
JournalPhysical Review D - Particles, Fields, Gravitation and Cosmology
Volume89
Issue number6
DOIs
StatePublished - Mar 5 2014

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Nuclear and High Energy Physics
  • Physics and Astronomy (miscellaneous)

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Sailing through the big crunch-big bang transition'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this