Chaos in Anisotropic Pre-Inflationary Universes

We study the dynamics of anisotropic Bianchi type-IX models with matter and cosmological constant. The models can be thought as describing the role of anisotropy in the early stages of inflation, where the cosmological constant Λ plays the role of the vacuum energy of the inflaton field. The concurrence of the cosmological constant and anisotropy are sufficient to produce a chaotic dynamics in the gravitational degrees of freedom, connected to the presence of a critical point of saddle-center type in the phase space of the system. In the neighborhood of the saddle-center, the phase space presents the structure of cylinders emanating from unstable periodic orbits. The non-integrability of the system implies that the extension of the cylinders away from this neighborhood has a complicated structure arising from their transversal crossings, resulting in a chaotic dynamics. The invariant character of chaos is guaranteed by the topology of cylinders. The model also presents a strong asymptotic de Sitter attractor but the way out from the initial singularity to the inflationary phase is completely chaotic. For a large set of initial conditions, even with very small anisotropy, the gravitational degrees of freedom oscillate a long time in the neighborhood of the saddle-center before recollapsing or escaping to the de Sitter phase. These oscillations may provide a resonance mechanism for amplification of specific wavelengths of inhomogeneous fluctuations in the models. A geometrical interpretation is given for Wald’s inequality in terms of invariant tori and their destruction by increasing values of the cosmological constant.