Eur. Phys. J. C (2017) 77: 682
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjc/s10052-017-5253-3

Letter

Knotty inflation and the dimensionality of spacetime

¹ Tait Institute, School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, EH9 3FD, UK
² Schmid College of Science, Chapman University, Orange, CA, 92866, USA
³ Department of Physics and Astronomy, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN, 37235, USA
⁴ Fakultät für Physik, Technische Universität Dortmund, 44221, Dortmund, Germany
⁵ Departamento de Física da Universidade de Aveiro and CIDMA, Campus de Santiago, 3810-183, Aveiro, Portugal

^* e-mail: joao.rosa@ua.pt

Received: 31 March 2017
Accepted: 24 September 2017
Published online: 14 October 2017

Abstract

We suggest a structure for the vacuum comprised of a network of tightly knotted/linked flux tubes formed in a QCD-like cosmological phase transition and show that such a network can drive cosmological inflation. As the network can be topologically stable only in three space dimensions, this scenario provides a dynamical explanation for the existence of exactly three large spatial dimensions in our Universe.