Phantoms and strange attractors in cosmology

Abstract

Abstract We study a cosmological model of gravity coupled to three, self-interacting scalar fields, one of them with negative kinetic term. The theory has cosmological solutions described by three-dimensional quadratic autonomous equations. Remarkably, the dynamical system has strange attractors, which are in fact very similar to the classic Lorenz attractor. The associated chaotic cosmologies exhibit highly fluctuating periods of contraction and expansion, alternating with long, steady periods in a de Sitter-like phase.