2017/02/14 by Anderson Mendonça da Silva, da Silva, Anderson Mendonça, J E F Skea +1
Physics and Astronomy · #Black Holes and Theoretical Physics #Cosmology and Gravitation Theories #FOS: Physical sciences #Galaxies: Formation, Evolution, Phenomena #General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology (gr-qc)
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1702.04630
openalex publication_date 2017/02/14 · openalex created_date 2017/02/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
We study cosmology in scalar-tensor (Bergmann Wagoner) gravity, restricting the coupling function, ω(ϕ) to be constant. Rather than specify the form of the cosmological function, λ(ϕ), the scalar field is modelled as a function which decays to its present value ϕ=1. Solutions of the field equations are found for which λ(ϕ) evolves from a large value (approximately 1) near the singularity to a small, non-zero value at later times, avoiding the problem of pre-inflationary collapse in standard general relativistic cosmology. Interpreting the model within the framework of Brans-Dicke theory with a scalar potential, we find that for suitable initial conditions, the reconstructed potential at late times for flat, open and closed universes is well described by a Higgs-like Mexican hat potential, quartic in ϕ, though this was not built in to the initial assumptions.