Related papers: Geodesically complete universes
In this dissertation we study two well known gravitational scenarios in which singularities may appear; the final state of gravitational collapse and the late time evolution of the universe. In the first scenario, we study a spherically…
The uniqueness theorems for general relativity and Yang-Mills theories can be circumvented by dropping the ubiquitous, yet often implicit, assumption that physical fields, such as the spacetime metric, are fundamental. The novel concept of…
Unless the reality of spacetime singularities is assumed, astrophysical black holes cannot be identical to their mathematical counterparts obtained as solutions of the Einstein field equations. Mechanisms for singularity regularization…
We propose a new notion of singularity in General Relativity which complements the usual notions of geodesic incompleteness and curvature singularities. Concretely, we say that a spacetime has a volume singularity if there exist points…
Singularities in general relativity such as the big bang and big crunch, and exotic singularities such as the big rip are the boundaries of the classical spacetimes. These events are marked by a divergence in the curvature invariants and…
The celebrated geodesic congruence equation of Raychaudhuri, together with the resulting singularity theorems of Penrose and Hawking that it enabled, yield a highly general set of conditions under which a spacetime (or, more generically, a…
Alternative scenarios to the Big Bang singularity have been subject of intense research for several decades by now. Most popular in this sense have been frameworks were such singularity is replaced by a bounce around some minimal…
Cosmological singularity theorems such as that of Hawking and Penrose assume local curvature conditions as well as global ones like the existence of a compact (achronal) slice. Here, we prove a new singularity theorem for chronological…
An introduction to extended theories of gravity formulated in metric-affine (or Palatini) spaces is presented. Focusing on spherically symmetric configurations with electric fields, we will see that in these theories the central singularity…
General relativity predicts its own demise at singularities, but also appears to conveniently shield itself from the catastrophic consequences of such singularities, making them safe. For instance, if strong cosmic censorship were…
Assuming that Quantum Mechanics is universal and that it can be applied over all scales, then the Universe is allowed to be in a quantum superposition of states, where each of them can correspond to a different space-time geometry. How can…
The global hyperbolicity assumption present in gravitational collapse singularity theorems is in tension with the quantum mechanical phenomenon of black hole evaporation. In this work I show that the causality conditions in Penrose's…
The generalized second law can be used to prove a singularity theorem, by generalizing the notion of a trapped surface to quantum situations. Like Penrose's original singularity theorem, it implies that spacetime is null geodesically…
In General Relativity, gravity is universally attractive, a feature embodied by the Raychaudhuri equation which requires that the expansion of a congruence of geodesics is always non-increasing, as long as matter obeys the strong or weak…
Spacetime singularities have been discovered which are physically much weaker than those predicted by the classical singularity theorems. Geodesics evolve through them and they only display infinities in the derivatives of their curvature…
In this paper we study the higher dimensional homogeneous and isotropic perfect fluid spacetimes in Einstein-Gauss-Bonnet (EGB) gravity. We solve the modified field equations with higher order curvature terms to determine the evolution of…
The prediction of spacetime singularities, regions of infinite curvature where classical physics breaks down, is one of the most profound challenges in General Relativity (GR). In particular, black hole solutions such as the Schwarzschild…
I investigate spacetime singularities from the point of view of the wavefunction of the universe. In order to extend the classical notion of geodesic incompleteness one has to include the proper time of an observer as a degree of freedom in…
This thesis operates within the framework of general relativity without curvature singularities. The motivation for this framework is explored, and several conclusions are drawn with a look towards future research. There are many ways to…
It is shown that the cosmological singularity in isotropic minisuperspaces is naturally removed by quantum geometry. Already at the kinematical level, this is indicated by the fact that the inverse scale factor is represented by a bounded…