Oliver Petersen: Formation of quiescent big bang singularities

Speaker
Oliver Petersen, Stockholm University

Abstract
Hawking’s singularity theorem says that cosmological solutions arising from initial data with positive mean curvature have a past singularity, in the sense that all inextendable causal geodesics eventually cease to exist or leave the spacetime. In this talk I will present a general condition on initial data ensuring in addition that the curvature blows up at the singularity (meaning that a big bang is formed) in the Einstein-nonlinear scalar field setting. This is joint work with Hans Oude Groeniger and Hans Ringström.