Fully stable cosmological solutions with a non-singular classical bounce

Abstract

We recently showed how it is possible to use a cubic Galileon action to construct classical cosmological solutions that enter a contracting null energy condition (NEC) violating phase, bounce at finite values of the scale factor and exit into an expanding NEC-satisfying phase without encountering any singularities or pathologies. A drawback of these examples is that singular behavior is encountered at some time either just before or just after the NEC-violating phase. In this Letter, we show that it is possible to circumvent this problem by extending our method to actions that include the next order L4 Galileon interaction. Using this approach, we construct non-singular classical bouncing cosmological solutions that are non-pathological for all times.

Keywords

• Bouncing cosmology
• Non-singular bounce
• Galileon
• Ghost instability
• Gradient instability