No Arabic abstract
It is widely believed that anisotropy in the expansion of the universe will decay exponentially fast during inflation. This is often referred to as the cosmic no-hair conjecture. However, we find a counter example to the cosmic no-hair conjecture in the context of supergravity. As a demonstration, we present an exact anisotropic power-law inflationary solution which is an attractor in the phase space. We emphasize that anisotropic inflation is quite generic in the presence of anisotropic sources which couple with an inflaton.
We study inflationary universes with an SU(3) gauge field coupled to an inflaton through a gauge kinetic function. Although the SU(3) gauge field grows at the initial stage of inflation due to the interaction with the inflaton, nonlinear self-couplings in the kinetic term of the gauge field become significant and cause nontrivial dynamics after sufficient growth. We investigate the evolution of the SU(3) gauge field numerically and reveal attractor solutions in the Bianchi type I spacetime. In general cases where all the components of the SU(3) gauge field have the same magnitude initially, they all tend to decay eventually because of the nonlinear self-couplings. Therefore, the cosmic no-hair conjecture generically holds in a mathematical sense. Practically, however, the anisotropy can be generated transiently in the early universe, even for an isotropic initial condition. Moreover, we find particular cases for which several components of the SU(3) gauge field survive against the nonlinear self-couplings. It occurs due to flat directions in the potential of a gauge field for Lie groups whose rank is higher than one. Thus, an SU(2) gauge field has a specialty among general non-Abelian gauge fields.
Inspired by an interesting counterexample to the cosmic no-hair conjecture found in a supergravity-motivated model recently, we propose a multi-field extension, in which two scalar fields are allowed to non-minimally couple to two vector fields, respectively. This model is shown to admit an exact Bianchi type I power-law solution. Furthermore, stability analysis based on the dynamical system method is performed to show that this anisotropic solution is indeed stable and attractive if both scalar fields are canonical. Nevertheless, if one of the two scalar fields is phantom then the corresponding anisotropic power-law inflation turns unstable as expected.
We examine whether an extended scenario of a two-scalar-field model, in which a mixed kinetic term of canonical and phantom scalar fields is involved, admits the Bianchi type I metric, which is homogeneous but anisotropic spacetime, as its power-law solutions. Then we analyze the stability of the anisotropic power-law solutions to see whether these solutions respect the cosmic no-hair conjecture or not during the inflationary phase. In addition, we will also investigate a special scenario, where the pure kinetic terms of canonical and phantom fields disappear altogether in field equations, to test again the validity of cosmic no-hair conjecture. As a result, the cosmic no-hair conjecture always holds in both these scenarios due to the instability of the corresponding anisotropic inflationary solutions.
It is known that power-law k-inflation can be realized for the Lagrangian $P=Xg(Y)$, where $X=-(partial phi)^2/2$ is the kinetic energy of a scalar field $phi$ and $g$ is an arbitrary function in terms of $Y=Xe^{lambda phi/M_{pl}}$ ($lambda$ is a constant and $M_{pl}$ is the reduced Planck mass). In the presence of a vector field coupled to the inflaton with an exponential coupling $f(phi) propto e^{mu phi/M_{pl}}$, we show that the models with the Lagrangian $P=Xg(Y)$ generally give rise to anisotropic inflationary solutions with $Sigma/H=constant$, where $Sigma$ is an anisotropic shear and $H$ is an isotropic expansion rate. Provided these anisotropic solutions exist in the regime where the ratio $Sigma/H$ is much smaller than 1, they are stable attractors irrespective of the forms of $g(Y)$. We apply our results to concrete models of k-inflation such as the generalized dilatonic ghost condensate/the DBI model and we numerically show that the solutions with different initial conditions converge to the anisotropic power-law inflationary attractors. Even in the de Sitter limit ($lambda to 0$) such solutions can exist, but in this case the null energy condition is generally violated. The latter property is consistent with the Walds cosmic conjecture stating that the anisotropic hair does not survive on the de Sitter background in the presence of matter respecting the dominant/strong energy conditions.
We show that second-generation gravitational-wave detectors at their design sensitivity will allow us to directly probe the ringdown phase of binary black hole coalescences. This opens the possibility to test the so-called black hole no-hair conjecture in a statistically rigorous way. Using state-of-the-art numerical relativity-tuned waveform models and dedicated methods to effectively isolate the quasi-stationary perturbative regime where a ringdown description is valid, we demonstrate the capability of measuring the physical parameters of the remnant black hole, and subsequently determining parameterized deviations from the ringdown of Kerr black holes. By combining information from $mathcal{O}(5)$ binary black hole mergers with realistic signal-to-noise ratios achievable with the current generation of detectors, the validity of the no-hair conjecture can be verified with an accuracy of $sim 1.5%$ at $90%$ confidence.