Ekpyrotic and cyclic cosmology

Ekpyrotic and cyclic cosmologies provide theories of the very early and of the very late universe. In these models, the big bang is described as a collision of branes — and thus the big bang is not the beginning of time. Before the big bang, there is an ekpyrotic phase with equation of state w = P ρ ≫ 1 (where P is the average pressure and ρ the average energy density) during which the universe slowly contracts. This phase resolves the standard cosmological puzzles and generates a nearly scale-invariant spectrum of cosmological perturbations containing a significant non-Gaussian component. At the same time it produces small-amplitude gravitational waves with a blue spectrum. The dark energy dominating the present-day cosmological evolution is reinterpreted as a small attractive force between our brane and a parallel one. This force eventually induces a new ekpyrotic phase and a new brane collision, leading to the idea of a cyclic universe. This review discusses the detailed properties of these models, their embedding in M-theory and their viability, with an emphasis on open issues and observational signatures.