New Ekpyrotic Quantum Cosmology

Abstract

Ekpyrotic instantons describe the emergence of classical contracting universes out of the no-boundary quantum state. However, up to now these instantons ended in a big crunch singularity. We remedy this by adding a higher-derivative term, allowing a ghost condensate to form. This causes a smooth, non-singular bounce from the contracting phase into an expanding, kinetic-dominated phase. Remarkably, and although there is a non-trivial evolution during the bounce, the wavefunction of the universe is "classical" in a WKB sense just as much after the bounce as before. These new non-singular instantons can thus form the basis for a fully non-singular and calculable ekpyrotic history of the universe, from creation until now.

6 pages, 9 figures

References in corpus (10)

• Towards a Nonsingular Bouncing Cosmology
• New Ekpyrotic Cosmology
• The Classical Universes of the No-Boundary Quantum State
• Inflationary schism after Planck2013
• Cosmological Perturbations Through a Non-Singular Ghost-Condensate/Galileon Bounce
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• On the No-Boundary Proposal for Ekpyrotic and Cyclic Cosmologies
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• Quantum Transitions Between Classical Histories: Bouncing Cosmologies

Cited by in corpus (16)

• Non-Singular Bouncing Cosmology: Consistency of the Effective Description
• Review of the No-Boundary Wave Function
• Bouncing Universe from Nothing
• Cosmological consequences of a principle of finite amplitudes
• The Cosmological OTOC: Formulating new cosmological micro-canonical correlation functions for random chaotic fluctuations in Out-of-Equilibrium Quantum Statistical Field Theory
• Fuzzy Euclidean wormholes in de Sitter space
• Quantum Transitions Through Cosmological Singularities
• The Non-Minimal Ekpyrotic Trispectrum
• Conflation: a new type of accelerated expansion
• A small Universe
• Quantum string cosmology
• Revisiting the no-boundary proposal with a scalar field
• Phase structure of the $O(2)$ ghost model with higher-order gradient term
• The role of spatial curvature in constraining the Universe anisotropies across a Big Bounce
• Dissipative Emergence of Inflation from Quasi-Cyclic Universe
• Delicate curvature bounces in the no-boundary wave function and in the late universe