DISTINGUISHING MARKS OF SIMPLY-CONNECTED UNIVERSES

A statistical quantity suitable for distinguishing simply-connected Robertson–Walker (RW) universes is introduced, and its explicit expressions for the three possible classes of simply-connected RW universes with an uniform distribution of matter are determined. Graphs of the distinguishing mark for each class of RW universes are presented and analyzed. There sprout from our results an improvement on the procedure to extract the topological signature of multiply-connected RW universes, and a refined understanding of that topological signature of these universes studied in previous works.