Late-time oscillatory behaviour for self-gravitating scalar fields

TL;DR

This paper rigorously analyzes the late-time oscillatory behavior of cosmological models with scalar fields, providing new asymptotic results for various scalar field theories and gravity models.

Contribution

It offers novel rigorous results on the asymptotics of homogeneous isotropic spacetimes with different scalar field models and gravity theories.

Findings

Oscillatory late-time behavior established for linear massive scalar fields

Generalizations to nonlinear scalar fields and alternative gravity models

Effects of matter and degenerate potentials on asymptotics

Abstract

This paper investigates the late-time behaviour of certain cosmological models where oscillations play an essential role. Rigorous results are proved on the asymptotics of homogeneous and isotropic spacetimes with a linear massive scalar field as source. Various generalizations are obtained for nonlinear massive scalar fields, $k$-essence models and $f(R)$ gravity. The effect of adding ordinary matter is discussed as is the case of nonlinear scalar fields whose potential has a degenerate zero.