Paper detail

The non-Abelian gauge theory of matrix big bangs

We study at the classical and quantum mechanical level the time-dependent Yang-Mills theory that one obtains via the generalisation of discrete light-cone quantisation to singular homogeneous plane waves. The non-Abelian nature of this theory is known to be important for physics near the singularity, at least as far as the number of degrees of freedom is concerned. We will show that the quartic interaction is always subleading as one approaches the singularity and that close enough to t=0 the evolution is driven by the diverging tachyonic mass term. The evolution towards asymptotically flat space-time also reveals some surprising features.