Cosmological perturbations through a simple bounce

We present a detailed study of a simple scalar field model that yields nonsingular cosmological solutions. We study both the qualitative dynamics of the homogeneous and isotropic background and the evolution of inhomogeneous linear perturbations. We calculate the spectrum of perturbations generated on super-Hubble scales during the collapse phase from initial vacuum fluctuations on small scales and then evolve these numerically through the bounce. We show there is a gauge in which perturbations remain well-defined and small throughout the bounce, even though perturbations in other commonly used gauges become large or ill-defined. We show that the comoving curvature perturbation calculated during the collapse phase provides a good estimate of the resulting large-scale adiabatic perturbation in the expanding phase while the Bardeen metric potential is dominated by what becomes a decaying mode after the bounce. We show that a power-law collapse phase with scale factor proportional to (-t)(2/3) can yield a scale-invariant spectrum of adiabatic scalar perturbations in the expanding phase, but the amplitude of tensor perturbations places important constraints on the allowed initial conditions.