25
views
0
recommends
+1 Recommend
0 collections
0
shares
• Record: found
• Abstract: found
• Article: found
Is Open Access

# Cosmology With Negative Potentials

Preprint
, , ,

### Read this article at

Bookmark
There is no author summary for this article yet. Authors can add summaries to their articles on ScienceOpen to make them more accessible to a non-specialist audience.

### Abstract

We investigate cosmological evolution in models where the effective potential V(\phi) may become negative for some values of the field \phi. Phase portraits of such theories in space of variables (\phi,\dot\phi,H) have several qualitatively new features as compared with phase portraits in the theories with V(\phi) > 0. Cosmological evolution in models with potentials with a "stable" minimum at V(\phi)<0 is similar in some respects to the evolution in models with potentials unbounded from below. Instead of reaching an AdS regime dominated by the negative vacuum energy, the universe reaches a turning point where its energy density vanishes, and then it contracts to a singularity with properties that are practically independent of V(\phi). We apply our methods to investigation of the recently proposed cyclic universe scenario. We show that in addition to the singularity problem there are other problems that need to be resolved in order to realize a cyclic regime in this scenario. We propose several modifications of this scenario and conclude that the best way to improve it is to add a usual stage of inflation after the singularity and use that inflationary stage to generate perturbations in the standard way.

### Most cited references4

• Record: found
• Abstract: found
• Article: found
Is Open Access

### Cosmology vs. Holography

(1999)
The most radical version of the holographic principle asserts that all information about physical processes in the world can be stored on its surface. This formulation is at odds with inflationary cosmology, which implies that physical processes in our part of the universe do not depend on the boundary conditions. Also, there are some indications that the radical version of the holographic theory in the context of cosmology may have problems with unitarity and causality. Another formulation of the holographic principle, due to Fischler and Susskind, implies that the entropy of matter inside the post-inflationary particle horizon must be smaller than the area of the horizon. Their conjecture was very successful for a wide class of open and flat universes, but it did not apply to closed universes. Bak and Rey proposed a different holographic bound on entropy which was valid for closed universes of a certain type. However, as we will show, neither proposal applies to open, flat and closed universes with matter and a small negative cosmological constant. We will argue, in agreement with Easther, Lowe, and Veneziano, that whenever the holographic constraint on the entropy inside the horizon is valid, it follows from the Bekenstein-Hawking bound on the black hole entropy. These constraints do not allow one to rule out closed universes and other universes which may experience gravitational collapse, and do not impose any constraints on inflationary cosmology.
Bookmark
• Record: found
• Abstract: found
• Article: found
Is Open Access

### Inflation and Preheating in NO models

(1999)
We study inflationary models in which the effective potential of the inflaton field does not have a minimum, but rather gradually decreases at large $$\phi$$. In such models the inflaton field does not oscillate after inflation, and its effective mass becomes vanishingly small, so the standard theory of reheating based on the decay of the oscillating inflaton field does not apply. For a long time the only mechanism of reheating in such non-oscillatory (NO) models was based on gravitational particle production in an expanding universe. This mechanism is very inefficient. We will show that it may lead to cosmological problems associated with large isocurvature fluctuations and overproduction of dangerous relics such as gravitinos and moduli fields. We also note that the setting of initial conditions for the stage of reheating in these models should be reconsidered. All of these problems can be resolved in the context of the recently proposed scenario of instant preheating if there exists an interaction $${g^2} \phi^2\chi^2$$ of the inflaton field $$\phi$$ with another scalar field $$\chi$$. We show that the mechanism of instant preheating in NO models is much more efficient than the usual mechanism of gravitational particle production even if the coupling constant $$g^2$$ is extremely small, $$10^{-14} \ll g^2 \ll 1$$.
Bookmark
• Record: found
• Abstract: found
• Article: found
Is Open Access

### The Cosmological Moduli Problem, Supersymmetry Breaking and Stability in Postinflationary Cosmology

(1995)
A survey of solutions to the cosmological moduli problem in string theory. The only extant proposal which may work is Intermediate Scale Inflation as proposed by Randall and Thomas. Supersymmetry preserving dynamics which could give large masses to the moduli is strongly constrained by cosmology and requires the existence of string vacuum states possessing properties different from those of any known vacuuum. Such a mechanism cannot give mass to the dilaton unless there are cancellations between different exponentially small contributions to the superpotential. Our investigation also shows that stationary points of the effective potential with negative vacuum energy do not correspond to stationary solutions of the equations of postinflationary cosmology. This suggests that supersymmetry breaking is a requirement for a successful inflationary cosmology.
Bookmark

### Author and article information

###### Journal
04 February 2002
2002-02-15
###### Article
10.1103/PhysRevD.66.023507
hep-th/0202017
ffde8671-027e-422b-94fd-77c8291b35ac
###### Custom metadata
CITA-2002-04
Phys.Rev.D66:023507,2002
51 page, 20 figures
hep-th astro-ph gr-qc hep-ph