Michael Koehn

Cosmological super-bounce

We study a model for a non-singular cosmic bounce in N=1 supergravity, based on supergravity versions of the ghost condensate and cubic Galileon scalar field theories. The bounce is preceded by an ekpyrotic contracting phase which prevents the growth of anisotropies in the approach to the bounce, and allows for the generation of scale-invariant density perturbations that carry over into the expanding phase of the universe. We present the conditions required for the bounce to be free of ghost excitations, as well as the tunings that are necessary in order for the model to be in agreement with cosmological observations. All of these conditions can be met. Our model thus provides a proof-of-principle that non-singular bounces are viable in supergravity, despite the fact that during the bounce the null energy condition is violated.

Higher-Derivative Chiral Superfield Actions Coupled to N=1 Supergravity

We construct N=1 supergravity extensions of scalar field theories with higher-derivative kinetic terms. Special attention is paid to the auxiliary fields, whose elimination leads not only to corrections to the kinetic terms, but to new expressions for the potential energy as well. For example, a potential energy can be generated even in the absence of a superpotential. Our formalism allows one to write a supergravity extension of any higher-derivative scalar field theory and, therefore, has applications to both particle physics and cosmological model building. As an illustration, we couple the higher-derivative DBI action describing a 3-brane in 6-dimensions to N=1 supergravity. This displays a number of new features-- including the fact that, in the regime where the higher-derivative kinetic terms become important, the potential tends to be everywhere negative.

Supersymmetric quantum cosmological billiards

D=11 supergravity near a spacelike singularity admits a cosmological billiard description based on the hyperbolic Kac-Moody group E{sub 10}. The quantization of this system via the supersymmetry constraint is shown to lead to wave functions involving automorphic (Maass wave) forms under the modular group W{sup +}(E{sub 10}) congruent with PSL{sub 2}(O) with Dirichlet boundary conditions on the billiard domain. A general inequality for the Laplace eigenvalues of these automorphic forms implies that the wave function of the Universe is generically complex and always tends to zero when approaching the initial singularity. We discuss possible implications of this result for the question of singularity resolution in quantum cosmology and comment on the differences with other approaches.

Ghost Condensate in N=1 Supergravity

We present the theory of a supersymmetric ghost condensate coupled to N=1 supergravity. This is accomplished using a general formalism for constructing locally supersymmetric higher-derivative chiral superfield actions. The theory admits a ghost condensate vacuum in de Sitter spacetime. Expanded around this vacuum, the scalar sector of the theory is shown to be ghost-free with no spatial gradient instabilities. By direct calculation, the fermion sector is found to consist of a massless chiral fermion and a massless gravitino. By analyzing the supersymmetry transformations, we find that the chiral fermion transforms inhomogeneously, indicating that the ghost condensate vacuum spontaneously breaks local supersymmetry with this field as the Goldstone fermion. Although potentially able to get a mass through the super-Higgs effect, the vanishing superpotential in the ghost condensate theory renders the gravitino massless. Thus local supersymmetry is broken without the super-Higgs effect taking place. This is in agreement with, and gives an explanation for, the direct calculation.

What the characters of irreducible subrepresentations of Jordan cells can tell us about LCFT

In this article, we review some aspects of logarithmic conformal field theories (LCFTs) which can be inferred from the characters of irreducible submodules of indecomposable modules. We will mainly consider the series of triplet algebras and a bit logarithmic extensions of the minimal Virasoro models. Since in all known examples of LCFTs the vacuum representation of the maximally extended chiral symmetry algebra is an irreducible submodule of a larger, indecomposable module, its character provides a lot of non-trivial information about the theory such as a set of functions which spans the space of all torus amplitudes. Despite such characters being modular forms of inhomogeneous weight, they fit in the ADET-classification of fermionic sum representations. Thus, they show that LCFTs naturally have to be taken into account when attempting to classify rational conformal field theories.

Nonsingular bouncing cosmology: Consistency of the effective description

We explicitly confirm that spatially flat non-singular bouncing cosmologies make sense as effective theories. The presence of a non-singular bounce in a spatially flat universe implies a temporary violation of the null energy condition, which can be achieved through a phase of ghost condensation. We calculate the scale of strong coupling and demonstrate that the ghost-condensate bounce remains trustworthy throughout, and that all perturbation modes within the regime of validity of the effective description remain under control. For this purpose we require the perturbed action up to third order in perturbations, which we calculate in both flat and co-moving gauge -- since these two gauges allow us to highlight different physical aspects. Our conclusion is that there exist healthy descriptions of non-singular bouncing cosmologies providing a viable resolution of the big-bang singularities in cosmological models. Our results also suggest a variant of ekpyrotic cosmology, in which entropy perturbations are generated during the contracting phase, but are only converted into curvature perturbations after the bounce.

Supersymmetric cubic Galileons have ghosts

Galileons are higher-derivative theories of a real scalar which nevertheless admit second-order equations of motion. They have interesting applications as dark energy models and in early universe cosmology, and have been conjectured to arise as descriptions of brane dynamics in string theory. In the present paper, we study the bosonic sector of globally N ¼ 1 supersymmetric extensions of the cubic Galileon Lagrangian in detail. Supersymmetry requires that the Galileon scalar now becomes paired with a second real scalar field. We prove that the presence of this second scalar causes the equations of motion to become higher than second order, thus leading to the appearance of ghosts. We also analyze the energy scales up to which, in an effective field theory description, the ghosts can be tamed.

DBI inflation in N ¼ 1 supergravity

It was recently demonstrated that, when coupled to N=1 supergravity, the Dirac-Born-Infeld (DBI) action constructed from a single chiral superfield has the property that when the higher-derivative terms become important, the potential becomes negative. Thus, DBI inflation cannot occur in its most interesting, relativistic regime. In this paper, it is shown how to overcome this problem by coupling the model to one or more additional chiral supermultiplets. In this way, one obtains effective single real scalar field DBI models with arbitrary positive potentials, as well as multiple real scalar field DBI inflation models with hybrid potentials.

Relativistic Wavepackets in Classically Chaotic Quantum Cosmological Billiards

Close to a spacelike singularity, pure gravity and supergravity in four to eleven spacetime dimensions admit a cosmological billiard description based on hyperbolic Kac-Moody groups. We investigate the quantum cosmological billiards of relativistic wavepackets towards the singularity, employing flat and hyperbolic space descriptions for the quantum billiards. We find that the strongly chaotic classical billiard motion of four-dimensional pure gravity corresponds to a spreading wavepacket subject to successive redshifts and tending to zero as the singularity is approached. We discuss the possible implications of these results in the context of singularity resolution and compare them with those of known semiclassical approaches. As an aside, we obtain exact solutions for the one-dimensional relativistic quantum billiards with moving walls.

Scalars with higher derivatives in supergravity and cosmology

We construct N = 1 supergravity extensions of scalar field theories with higher-derivative kinetic terms. Special attention is paid to the auxiliary fields, whose elimination leads not only to corrections to the kinetic terms, but to new expressions for the potential energy as well. Our formalism allows one to write a supergravity extension of any higher-derivative scalar field theory and therefore has applications to both particle physics and cosmological model building. For instance, the ghost condensate vacuum spontaneously breaks local supersymmetry without the super-Higgs effect taking place. Supersymmetric cubic Galileons are shown to imply equations of motion of higher than second order, thus leading to the appearance of ghosts.