Closed trapped surfaces in cosmology (Q1404005)

According to the Hawking-Penrose singularity theorems, the existence of a closed trapped surface implies the existence of a singularity, provided that some additional assumptions are satisfied. These additional assumptions include, in particular, some energy condition. For spatially compact Robertson-Walker universes, one might have conjectured that the existence of a closed trapped surface alone would already imply the existence of a singularity. In the paper under review the author demonstrates, by way of examples, that this conjecture is false. In particular, the de Sitter universe contains several closed trapped surfaces but is geodesically complete. The case of a perturbed de Sitter universe is also treated. In general, the results of the paper emphasize the relevance of energy conditions for the Hawking-Penrose singularity theorems. This is important because energy conditions might be violated during an inflationary period of the early universe.