A covariant Lagrangian for stable nonsingular bounce

Abstract

The nonsingular bounce models usually suffer from the ghost or gradient instabilities, as has been proved recently. In this paper, we propose a covariant effective theory for stable nonsingular bounce, which has the quadratic order of the second order derivative of the field $\varphi$ but the background set only by $P(\varphi ,X)$. With it, we explicitly construct a fully stable nonsingular bounce model for the ekpyrotic scenario.

12 pages, 6 figures; published in JHEP; an Appendix and references added