Cosmological Perturbations on a Bouncing Brane

Abstract The cosmological perturbations on a bouncing brane are studied. The brane is moving inside a Klebanov-Strassler throat where the infra-red region of the geometry is smoothly cut off. For an observer confined to the world-volume of the brane, this results in a non-singular bouncing mirage cosmology. We have calculated the scalar perturbations corresponding to the normal displacements of the brane. This is performed in the probe brane limit where the gravitational back-reaction of the brane on the bulk throat is absent. Our model provides a framework for studying the transfer of fluctuations from a contracting to an expanding phase. We find that the spectral index of the dominant mode of the metric fluctuation is un-changed, unlike what is obtained by gluing contracting to expanding Einstein universes with the help of the usual matching conditions. Assuming that the fluctuations start off in a vacuum state on sub-Hubble scales during the contracting phase, it is shown that the resulting spectral index ns on super-Hubble scales in the expanding phase has a large blue tilt. When the brane is moving slowly inside the throat and its kinetic energy is negligible compared to its rest mass, one finds ns = 3. For a fast-rolling brane with a large kinetic energy, the spectral index is ns = 2.3. This may put severe constraints on models of mirage cosmology.