On resolutions of cosmological singularities in higher-spin gravity

Abstract

We study the resolution of certain cosmological singularity in the context of higher-spin three-dimensional gravity. We consider gravity coupled to a spin-3 field realized as Chern–Simons theory with gauge group [Formula: see text]. In this context, we elaborate and extend a singularity resolution scheme proposed by Krishnan and Roy. We discuss the resolution of a big bang singularity in the case of gravity coupled to a spin-4 field realized as Chern–Simons theory with gauge group [Formula: see text]. In all these cases, we show the existence of gauge transformations that do not change the holonomy of the Chern–Simons gauge potential and lead to metrics without the initial singularity. We argue that such transformations always exist in the context of gravity coupled to a spin-[Formula: see text] field when described by Chern–Simons with gauge group [Formula: see text].