Scalar trace anomaly and anti-gravitational interaction in a perturbative approach to self-consistent cosmologies

Abstract

We present a perturbative approach to the equations controlling the behavior of the recently proposed self-consistent, causal, singularity-free cosmologies. This approach sheds a new light on the threshold mass which governs both the (in)stability of empty Minkowski space and the existence of these cosmologies. An unexpected fact arises at the lower order of this perturbative scheme: the mass of the massive (scalar) field coupled non-minimally to gravitation is completely absorbed in a rescaling of the gravitational constant. The latter becomes negative, thereby causing an effective anti-gravitational interaction when the corresponding mass exceeds the minkowskian instability threshold. Moreover, the source of this effective antigravitational interaction is the usual scalar trace anomaly associated with the residual massless part of the matter field.