Fully stable cosmological solutions with a non-singular classical bounce

We recently showed how it is possible to use a cubic Galileon action to construct classical cosmological solutions that enter a contracting null energy condition (NEC) violating phase, bounce at finite values of the scale factor and exit into an expanding NEC-satisfying phase without encountering any singularities or pathologies. A drawback of these examples is that singular behavior is encountered at some time either just before or just after the NEC-violating phase. In this Letter, we show that it is possible to circumvent this problem by extending our method to actions that include the next order L-4 Galileon interaction. Using this approach, we construct non-singular classical bouncing cosmological solutions that are non-pathological for all times. (C) 2016 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier B.V.