Informal Pizza Seminar

Breakdown of linear cosmological perturbation theory near de Sitter spacetime

Bojan Losic

University of Alberta

I review a recent argument which suggests that second order perturbative effects near a de Sitter spacetime can generically dominate linear effects. The argument is inherently gauge invariant and relies only on the facts that de Sitter spacetime admits a global, spatially closed slice, that it possesses Killing vectors, and the perturbations obey Einstein's equations.