Big Bangs and Bounces on the Brane

TL;DR

This paper explores how brane-world scenarios with black holes in higher dimensions can lead to cosmological models featuring bounces or big bang/crunch events, offering insights into quantum gravity and universe evolution.

Contribution

It demonstrates that bulk black holes induce different cosmological evolutions on the brane, revealing a critical mass threshold and providing a holographic interpretation.

Findings

Black hole mass determines universe type (bounce or big bang/crunch).

Critical mass is non-zero only for spherical horizons.

Holographic interpretation links bulk black holes to brane cosmology.

Abstract

In view of our accelerating universe, one of the outstanding theoretical issues is the absence of a quantum-gravitational description of de Sitter space. Although speculative, an intriguing circumvention may be found in the realm of brane-world scenarios; where the physical universe can be interpreted as a non-critical 3-brane moving in a higher-dimensional, static bulk. In this paper, we focus on the cosmological implications of a positively curved brane world evolving in the background of a ``topological'' anti-de Sitter black hole (i.e, Schwarzschild-like but with an arbitrary horizon topology). We show that the bulk black hole will typically induce either an asymptotically de Sitter ``bounce'' universe or a big bang/big crunch FRW universe, depending on a critical value of mass. Interestingly, the critical mass is only non-vanishing in the case of a spherical horizon geometry. We go on to provide a holographic interpretation of this curiosity.