De Sitter solutions in Einstein-Gauss-Bonnet gravity

TL;DR

This paper investigates de Sitter solutions within Einstein-Gauss-Bonnet gravity, emphasizing their stability and relevance to cosmological inflation and late-time acceleration, using an effective potential approach.

Contribution

It introduces an effective potential method to simplify the analysis of de Sitter solutions and their stability in Einstein-Gauss-Bonnet gravity models.

Findings

Stable de Sitter solutions correspond to minima of the effective potential.

The method simplifies the search and stability analysis of solutions.

Applications to inflationary and dark energy models.

Abstract

De Sitter solutions play an important role in cosmology because the knowledge of unstable de Sitter solutions can be useful to describe inflation, whereas stable de Sitter solutions are often used in models of late-time acceleration of the Universe. The Einstein-Gauss-Bonnet gravity cosmological models are actively used both as inflationary models and as dark energy models. To modify the Einstein equations one can add a nonlinear function of the Gauss-Bonnet term or a function of the scalar field multiplied on the Gauss-Bonnet term. The effective potential method essentially simplifies the search and stability analysis of de Sitter solutions, because the stable de Sitter solutions correspond to minima of the effective potential.