Cosmological networks

Abstract

Networks often represent systems that do not have a long history of study in traditional fields of physics; albeit, there are some notable exceptions, such as energy landscapes and quantum gravity. Here, we consider networks that naturally arise in cosmology. Nodes in these networks are stationary observers uniformly distributed in an expanding open Friedmann–Lemaître–Robertson–Walker universe with any scale factor and two observers are connected if one can causally influence the other. We show that these networks are growing Lorentz-invariant graphs with power-law distributions of node degrees. These networks encode maximum information about the observable universe available to a given observer.

Keywords

• complex networks
• cosmology
• scale-free networks
• 89.75.Fb
• 64.60.aq
• 04.20.Gz