The primordial curvature perturbation in the ekpyrotic Universe

In the ekpyrotic scenario the Universe is initially collapsing, the energy density coming from a scalar field with a negative exponential potential. On the basis of a calculation ignoring the gravitational back-reaction the authors of the scenario claim that during collapse the vacuum fluctuation creates a perturbation in the comoving curvature, which has a flat spoctrum in accordance with observation. In this Letter the back-reaction is included, and it is found that the spectrum during collapse is strongly scale-dependent with negligible magnitude. (C) 2002 Published by Elsevier Science B.V.