The de Sitter spacetime as an attractor solution in fourth-order gravity

We investigate the general vacuum solution of fourth-order gravity, and include the Bach tensor. For L2 = 1.3μR2 + 1/2αC2 the expanding de Sitter spacetime is an attractor in the set of axially symmetric Bianchi type-I models if and only if αμ ≤ 0 or α > 4μ holds. It will be argued that this result holds true for a large class of inhomogeneous models. As a byproduct, a new closed-form cosmological solution, is obtained. It is also shown that the de Sitter spacetime is an attractor for the Bach-Einstein gravity with a minimally coupled scalar field φ. Specialised to Einstein gravity (i.e. α = 0 above) this conformal equivalence remains a non-trivial one. (author)