The Spectral Action and Cosmic Topology

Abstract

The spectral action functional, considered as a model of gravity coupled to matter, provides, in its non-perturbative form, a slow-roll potential for inflation, whose form and corresponding slow-roll parameters can be sensitive to the underlying cosmic topology. We explicitly compute the non-perturbative spectral action for some of the main candidates for cosmic topologies, namely the quaternionic space, the Poincaré dodecahedral space, and the flat tori. We compute the corresponding slow-roll parameters and we check that the resulting inflation model behaves in the same way as for a simply-connected spherical topology in the case of the quaternionic space and the Poincaré homology sphere, while it behaves differently in the case of the flat tori. We add an appendix with a discussion of the case of lens spaces.

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