Numerical Relativity as a New Tool for Fundamental Cosmology
arXiv:2201.03752 · doi:10.3390/physics4010021
Abstract
Advances in our understanding of the origin, evolution and structure of the universe have long been driven by cosmological perturbation theory, model building and effective field theory. In this review, we introduce numerical relativity as a powerful new complementary tool for fundamental cosmology. To illustrate its power, we discuss applications of numerical relativity to studying the robustness of slow contraction and inflation in homogenizing, isotropizing and flattening the universe beginning from generic unsmooth initial conditions. In particular, we describe how recent numerical relativity studies of slow contraction have revealed a novel, non-linear smoothing mechanism based on ultralocality that challenges the conventional view on what is required to explain the large-scale homogeneity and isotropy of the observable universe.
16 pages, 3 figures
References in corpus (13)
- Five-Year Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) Observations: Cosmological Interpretation
- Starting the Universe: Stable Violation of the Null Energy Condition and Non-standard Cosmologies
- Simulation of Binary Black Hole Spacetimes with a Harmonic Evolution Scheme
- A new kind of cyclic universe
- Stability of Geodesically Complete Cosmologies
- Cosmological bounce and Genesis beyond Horndeski
- Fixing extensions to General Relativity in the non-linear regime
- Spikes in the Mixmaster regime of G_2 cosmologies
- Supersmoothing through Slow Contraction
- Ekpyrotic Cosmology with a Zero-Shear S-Brane
- Robustness of slow contraction to cosmic initial conditions
- Inhomogeneous initial conditions for inflation: A wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey path to salvation
- Fermi-bounce cosmology and the fermion curvaton mechanism