Evolving black holes in a nonsingular bouncing universe

One of the main unanswered questions of theoretical cosmology is whether the universe emerged from a big bang followed by a period of inflation

or whether it had no beginning at all and bounced from a period of slow contraction to the current expanding phase.

It has been shown recently that it is possible for the universe to undergo a nonsingular bounce at energies well below the Planck scale such that

the entire evolution can be treated classically. It is however still unclear how to treat the passage of any pre-existing black holes through the bounce to the expanding phase.

In this talk, we use numerical techniques to consider the classical evolution of a black hole in a non-singular universe

driven by a ``ghost'' scalar field. We show that at least for small enough black holes, the black hole passes through the bounce freely and discuss cosmological implications.