Singularities in FLRW Spacetimes

Huibert het Lam, Tom Prokopec

Research output: Contribution to journalArticleAcademicpeer-review

Abstract

We point out that past-incompleteness of geodesics in FLRW spacetimes does not necessarily imply that these spacetimes start from a singularity. Namely, if a test particle that follows such a trajectory has a non-vanishing velocity, its energy was super-Planckian at some time in the past if it kept following that geodesic. That indicates a breakdown of the particle's description, which is why we should not consider those trajectories for the definition of an initial singularity. When one only considers test particles that do not have this breakdown of their trajectory, it turns out that the only singular FLRW spacetimes are the ones that have a scale parameter that vanishes at some initial time.
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)311-314
JournalPhysics Letters B
Volume775
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 10 Dec 2017

Keywords

  • FLRW spacetime
  • Incomplete geodesics
  • Singularity

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