A covariant Lagrangian for stable nonsingular bounce

Abstract

The nonsingular bounce models usually suffer from the ghost or gradient instabilities, as has been proved recently. In this paper, we propose a covariant effective theory for stable nonsingular bounce, which has the quadratic order of the second order derivative of the field ϕ but the background set only by P (ϕ, X). With it, we explicitly construct a fully stable nonsingular bounce model for the ekpyrotic scenario.