Breaking de Sitter Symmetry with Cosmic Topology: Cosmological Role of Infrared Vacuum Freedom
Abstract
When spatial sections of spacetime are topologically nontrivial, the symmetry arguments usually used to choose the Bunch-Davies vacuum are no longer guaranteed to apply. We study this problem for a scalar field on de Sitter spacetime with toroidal spatial sections. The Hadamard conditions, which ensure the same short-distance structure as in flat space, are local and naturally insensitive to the compactification. By contrast, we find that the infrared sector is affected by the toroidal identifications that break global de Sitter invariance, thereby removing the usual argument for discarding zero-mode contributions. We treat the remaining zero-mode freedom as an effective topology-induced source and analyze its effects on an inflationary de Sitter expansion within a semiclassical setting. We show that, for a massless scalar, the zero-mode sector can contain a contribution to the stress-energy tensor with equation of state P=−ρ, behaving as a cosmological constant. Thus, the source driving an early-Universe de Sitter phase need not be determined solely by local terms in the action, but can also depend on the infrared structure of the quantum state. Nontrivial topology, as a concrete realization of de Sitter symmetry violation, turns the otherwise-unfixed infrared freedom in vacuum selection to a contribution directly relevant to the semiclassical expansion. This contribution could potentially be applicable to the current accelerated expansion of the Universe.
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BibTeX
@misc{negro2026breaking,
title = {{Breaking de Sitter Symmetry with Cosmic Topology: Cosmological Role of Infrared Vacuum Freedom}},
author = {Anna Negro and Kurt Hinterbichler and Glenn D Starkman and Yashar Akrami and Stefano Anselmi and Javier Carrón Duque and Mikel Martin Barandiaran and Andrius Tamosiunas},
howpublished = {HAL},
year = {2026},
month = sep,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2609.28637},
eprint = {2609.28637},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://hal.science/hal-05781795v1},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Breaking de Sitter Symmetry with Cosmic Topology: Cosmological Role of Infrared Vacuum Freedom
AU - Anna Negro
AU - Kurt Hinterbichler
AU - Glenn D Starkman
AU - Yashar Akrami
AU - Stefano Anselmi
AU - Javier Carrón Duque
AU - Mikel Martin Barandiaran
AU - Andrius Tamosiunas
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/09/23
PB - HAL
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2609.28637
UR - https://hal.science/hal-05781795v1
AB - When spatial sections of spacetime are topologically nontrivial, the symmetry arguments usually used to choose the Bunch-Davies vacuum are no longer guaranteed to apply. We study this problem for a scalar field on de Sitter spacetime with toroidal spatial sections. The Hadamard conditions, which ensure the same short-distance structure as in flat space, are local and naturally insensitive to the compactification. By contrast, we find that the infrared sector is affected by the toroidal identifications that break global de Sitter invariance, thereby removing the usual argument for discarding zero-mode contributions. We treat the remaining zero-mode freedom as an effective topology-induced source and analyze its effects on an inflationary de Sitter expansion within a semiclassical setting. We show that, for a massless scalar, the zero-mode sector can contain a contribution to the stress-energy tensor with equation of state P=−ρ, behaving as a cosmological constant. Thus, the source driving an early-Universe de Sitter phase need not be determined solely by local terms in the action, but can also depend on the infrared structure of the quantum state. Nontrivial topology, as a concrete realization of de Sitter symmetry violation, turns the otherwise-unfixed infrared freedom in vacuum selection to a contribution directly relevant to the semiclassical expansion. This contribution could potentially be applicable to the current accelerated expansion of the Universe.
ER -