Hysteresis in the Sky

TL;DR

This paper explores cosmological hysteresis in various modified gravity models, showing how it can lead to cyclic universes with increasing amplitude, offering an alternative to inflation and introducing an arrow of time in a dissipationless setting.

Contribution

It demonstrates the widespread occurrence of hysteresis in different cosmological potentials within modified gravity frameworks, providing semi-analytical conditions for an ever-expanding universe.

Findings

Hysteresis causes increasing cycle amplitudes in cyclic cosmologies.

The phenomenon depends on the sign of the hysteresis loop integral.

Hysteresis introduces an arrow of time without dissipation.

Abstract

Hysteresis is a phenomenon occurring naturally in several magnetic and electric materials in condensed matter physics. When applied to cosmology, aka cosmological hysteresis, has interesting and vivid implications in the scenario of a cyclic bouncy universe. Most importantly, this physical prescription can be treated as an alternative proposal to inflationary paradigm. Cosmological hysteresis is caused by the asymmetry in the equation of state parameter during expansion and contraction phase of the universe, due to the presence of a single scalar field. This process is purely thermodynamical in nature, results in a non-vanishing hysteresis loop integral $(\oint pdV)$ in cosmology. When applied to variants of modified gravity models -1) Dvali-Gabadadze-Porrati (DGP) brane world gravity, 2) Cosmological constant dominated Einstein gravity, 3) Loop Quantum Gravity (LQG), 4) Einstien-Gauss-Bonnet brane world gravity and 5) Randall Sundrum single brane world gravity (RSII), under certain circumstances, this phenomenon leads to the increase in amplitude of the consecutive cycles and to a universe with older and larger successive cycles, provided we have physical mechanisms to make the universe bounce and turnaround. This inculcates an arrow of time in a dissipationless cosmology. Remarkably, this phenomenon appears to be widespread in several cosmological potentials in variants of modified gravity background, which we explicitly study for- i) Hilltop, ii) Natural and iii) Colemann-Weinberg potentials, in this paper. Semi-analytical analysis of these models, for different potentials with minimum/minima, show that the conditions which creates a universe with an ever increasing expansion, depend on the signature of the hysteresis loop integral $(\oint pdV)$ as well as on the variants of model parameters.