Bouncing Palatini cosmologies and their perturbations

Abstract

Nonsingular cosmologies are investigated in the framework of f(R) gravity within the first order formalism. General conditions for bounces in isotropic and homogeneous cosmology are presented. It is shown that only a quadratic curvature correction is needed to predict a bounce in a flat or to describe cyclic evolution in a curved dust-filled universe. Formalism for perturbations in these models is set up. In the simplest cases, the perturbations diverge at the turnover. Conditions to obtain smooth evolution are derived.Comment: 7 pages, 1 figure. v2: added references