From big crunch to big bang

By J. Khoury, B. Ovrut, N. Seiberg, Paul J. Steinhardt, N. Turok. 2001

599 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We consider conditions under which a universe contracting towards a big crunch can make a transition to an expanding big bang universe. A promising example is 11-dimensional M-theory in which the eleventh dimension collapses, bounces, and re-expands. At the bounce, the model can reduce to a weakly coupled heterotic string theory and, we conjecture, it may be possible to follow the transition from contraction to expansion. The possibility opens the door to new classes of cosmological models. For example, we discuss how it suggests a major simplification and modification of the recently proposed ekpyrotic scenario.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/3af94240e9e95e59316fa6847cbf5acf18a6e44e

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Citations in the corpus

Three Year Wilkinson Microwave Anistropy Probe (WMAP) Observations: Polarization Analysis (2006, background): “For example, ekpyrotic/cyclic models (Khoury et al. 2002; Steinhardt & Turok 2002) predict no observable tensor modes.”
Solvable model of strings in a time-dependent plane-wave background (2002, background): “(35)A similar continuation prescription was proposed in an interesting paper [56] for a quantum field theory in a compactified Milne-type metric (ds(2) = −dt2 + t(2)dy(2) + dx(2), −∞ < t < ∞, y ≡ y + L) motivated by the cosmological model of [5].”
Holographic description of AdS cosmologies (2005, background): “as envisioned in the pre-big bang [3] and cyclic universe [ 4 ] models.”
D‐branes in Standard Model building, gravity and cosmology (2003, background): “The presence of anti-branes seems to be an important ingredient of some cosmological approaches to the early universe [49, 50, 63, 46, 47].”
Loop quantum cosmology: an overview (2008, methodology): “a pre-big-bang branch to our universe has been advocated in several approaches, most notably by the pre-big-bang scenario in string theory [13] and ekpyrotic and cyclicmodels[14, 15 ]inspiredbythebraneworldideas.However,theseareperturbativetreatmentswhichrequireasmoothcontinuuminthebackground.Theref”
New Ekpyrotic Cosmology (2007, unknown): “some epoch during which H>˙ 0. But this is highly non-trivial to achieve in any particle physics model. Consider for instance a non-linear sigma model of N scalar ﬁelds 20 with arbitrary potential [2]: L = 1 2 Gij φk ∂φi∂φj+V φi . (6.1) As long as the metric on moduli space Gij is positive-deﬁnit”
String gas cosmology (2005, background): “Although many different approaches have been attempted (see e.g. (Gasperini and Veneziano, 2003; Khoury et al., 2002)), no convincing models have been found (Polchinski, 2005).”
FIVE-YEAR WILKINSON MICROWAVE ANISOTROPY PROBE OBSERVATIONS: COSMOLOGICAL INTERPRETATION (2008, unknown): “…universe followed by a bounce to expansion can, in principle, make a set of predictions that are qualitatively similar to those of inflation models (Khoury et al. 2001, 2002a,b; Khoury et al. 2003; Buchbinder et al. 2007, 2008; Koyama & Wands 2007; Koyama et al. 2007; Creminelli & Senatore 2007),…”
Rapidly-Varying Speed of Sound, Scale Invariance and Non-Gaussian Signatures (2008, background): “, which is at the root of chaotic mixmaster behavior [41, 42]. In order to blueshift faster and win over anisotropy, our component must satisfy >3, or w>1 [2, 38]. This is the ekpyrotic branch [3, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47]. See [11] for a review of the ekpyrotic/cyclic scenario. Indeed, ekpyrotic co”
Clean Time-Dependent String Backgrounds from Bubble Baths (2002, background): “n string theory In general, the description of time-dependent backgrounds in string theory is a notoriously diﬃcult subject. One longstanding problem [38], which is starting to receive more attention [39], is that most known time-dependent backgrounds, and in particular the ones which are relevant f”