Inflation from extra dimensions
Recently there has been growing interest (1) in the possibility that the universe could have more than four dimensions. Aside from any light this may shed on problems in particle physics, if true it would undoubtedly have important implications for early cosmology. A rather speculative but very appealing possibility suggested by D. Sahdev and by E. Alvarez and B. Gavela is that the gravitational collapse of extra spatial dimensions could drive an inflation of ordinary space. This kind of inflationary cosmology would be quite different from the inflationary cosmologies now so intensively studied which are supposed to result from changes in vacuum energy during phase transitions in the early universe. In our work we examine the physics of these Kaluza-Klein inflationary cosmologies and come to three main conclusions. (1) It is desirable to have many extra dimensions, many being of order forty or fifty. (2) For models which give a realistically large inflation almost all of this inflation occurs in a period when quantum gravity is certainly important. This means that Einstein's equations cannot be used to calculate the details of this inflationary period. (3) Under plausible assumptions one may argue from the second law of thermodynamics that given appropriate initial conditions a large inflation will occur even when details of the inflationary phase cannot be calculated classically.
- Research Organization:
- Washington Univ., Seattle (USA). Dept. of Physics
- DOE Contract Number:
- AC06-81ER40048
- OSTI ID:
- 5959741
- Report Number(s):
- DOE/ER/40048-12-P4; CONF-8405155-6; ON: DE85007834
- Resource Relation:
- Conference: Inner space/outer space conference, Batavia, IL, USA, 2 May 1984
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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