Ekpyrotic bounce driven by Kalb-Ramond field

TL;DR

This paper presents a non-singular ekpyrotic bounce model driven by a Kalb-Ramond field interacting with a scalaron, addressing the generation of nearly scale-invariant primordial perturbations compatible with Planck data.

Contribution

It introduces a novel ekpyrotic bounce scenario involving a Kalb-Ramond field and a scalaron, with an extended phase to produce consistent cosmological perturbations.

Findings

The bounce is non-singular and symmetric.

Standard Big Bang cosmology is recovered after the bounce.

The extended scenario yields nearly scale-invariant curvature perturbations.

Abstract

We propose an ekpyrotic bounce scenario driven by a second rank antisymmetric Kalb-Ramond field, where the universe initially contracts through an ekpyrotic stage having a non-singular bouncing like behaviour, and consequently, it smoothly transits to an expanding phase. In particular, the KR field has an interaction with a scalaron field (coming from higher curvature d.o.f) by a linear coupling. The interaction energy density between the KR and the scalaron grows faster than $a^{-6}$ during the contraction phase -- which has negligible effects at the distant past, however as the universe continues to contract, this interaction energy density gradually grows and plays a significant role to trigger a non-singular bounce at a minimum value of the scale factor. The bounce being symmetric and ekpyrotic, the energy density of the bouncing agent rapidly decreases after the bounce during the expanding phase of the universe, and consequently the standard Big-Bang cosmology gets recovered. In such ekpyrotic bounce scenario, we find that the curvature perturbation gets a blue tilted spectrum over the large scale modes -- not consistent with the Planck data. To circumvent this problem, we propose an extended scenario where the ekpyrotic phase is preceded by a quasi-matter dominated pre-ekpyrotic phase, and re-investigate the perturbation power spectrum. As a result, the primordial curvature perturbation, at scales that cross the horizon during the pre-ekpyrotic stage, turns out to be nearly scale invariant that is indeed consistent with the recent Planck data. The hallmark of the work is that although the Kalb-Ramond field has negligible footprints at present universe, it has considerable impacts during early stage of the universe, which in turn makes the universe's evolution non-singular.