Event

Talk
Particle Horizons in the Mixmaster Universe
Bernhard Brehm (FU Berlin)
7 Nov 2016, 16:00 – 17:00

The Mixmaster Universe has been proposed by Misner (1969) as a model for a chaotic big bang cosmological singularity. This cosmological model describes Bianchi IX spatially homogeneous, anisotropic vacuum space-times. In 1970, Belinskii, Khalatnikov, and Lifshitz (BKL) conjectured that particle horizons form towards the big bang. In other words, backwards light-cones remain spatially bounded, and spatially separate regions causally decouple.
We prove this BKL conjecture, for almost every solution.
More specifically, the answer to this question depends on the convergence speed towards the Mixmaster attractor. Ringström (2001) showed that this convergence occurs at all. We introduce a novel expanding measure in order to prove that the convergence is fast enough to guarantee the formation of particle horizons for Lebesgue almost every solution.
The talk is addressed at a nonspecialist audience.