Anisotropic examples of inflation-generating initial conditions for the big bang

Abstract

The inflationary scenario, which states that the early universe underwent a brief but dramatic period of accelerated spatial expansion, has become the current paradigm of early universe cosmology. Although inflationary cosmology has its many successes, it does not (as of yet) have the status of an established physical theory. In this paper, we provide mathematical support for the inflationary scenario in a class of anisotropic spacetimes by generalizing the work in [21]. These anisotropic spacetimes satisfy certain initial conditions so that they are perfectly isotropic at the big bang but become less isotropic as time progresses. The resulting inflationary eras are a consequence of the initial conditions which force the energy-momentum tensor to be dominated by a cosmological constant at the big bang.

20 pages, 3 figures, proceeding article for Minkowski meeting 2023 volume