A small ripple that triggers a tidal wave. In the primordial Universe, tiny quantum fluctuations could have had a profound effect on the cosmos.
Using cutting-edge numerical simulations, a team of scientists from CNRS Earth & Universe, CNRS Physics, and Johns Hopkins University (United States) studied the evolution of quantum fluctuations generated during cosmological inflation, a brief phase of accelerated expansion of the Universe 13.7 billion years ago.
The research team discovered that these small fluctuations, amplified by non-linear phenomena, can radically alter the fate of the Universe.
While the initial phase of inflation is relatively well understood thanks to observations of cosmic radiation and the distribution of galaxies in the Universe, the subsequent phase remains entirely unknown because no electromagnetic information reaches us from it. However, gravitational astronomy is opening a new window onto this dark age of inflation, which scientists have studied for the first time with numerical simulations.
They have shown that in certain theories, the entire Universe can be trapped in a state of eternal inflation, inhospitable to life. In other cases, quantum fluctuations may trigger the formation of black holes from the collapse of universe pockets. These black holes are not typical stellar remnants: inside is not the collapsed core of a star, but an entire parallel universe!
An artistic representation of the primordial Universe, in which microscopic quantum fluctuations lead to either eternal inflation or the collapse of certain regions of the Universe into black holes.
© Angelo Caravano with AI
This work marks a breakthrough in the study of the primordial Universe using non-perturbative methods, at the intersection of cosmology, chaos theory, and computational sciences.
References:
Angelo Caravano, Keisuke Inomata, and Sébastien Renaux-Petel,
Inflationary Butterfly Effect: Nonperturbative Dynamics from Small-Scale Features, Phys. Rev. Lett.
133, 151001 (2024).