English

The cosmological constant from Planckian fluctuations and the averaging procedure

General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology 2019-11-05 v1 High Energy Physics - Theory

Abstract

In this paper I continue the investigation in \cite{1,1b} concerning my proposal on the nature of the cosmological constant. In particular, I study both mathematically and physically the quantum Planckian context and I provide, in order to depict quantum fluctuations and in absence of a complete quantum gravity theory, a semiclassical solution where an effective inhomogeneous metric at Planckian scales or above is averaged. In such a framework, a generalization of the well known Buchert formalism \cite{2} is obtained with the foliation in terms of the mean value s(t^)s(\hat{t}) of the time operator t^\hat{t} in a maximally localizing state {s}\{s\} of a quantum spacetime \cite{3,4,5,6} and in a cosmological context \cite{7}. As a result, after introducing a decoherence length scale LDL_D where quantum fluctuations are averaged on, a classical de Sitter universe emerges with a small cosmological constant depending on LDL_D and frozen in a true vacuum state (lowest energy), provided that the kinematical backreaction is negligible at that scale LDL_D. Finally, I analyse the case with a non-vanishing initial spatial curvature R\mathcal{R} showing that, for a reasonable large class of models, spatial curvature and kinematical backreation Q\mathcal{Q} are suppressed by the dynamical evolution of the spacetime.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1910.12463,
  title  = {The cosmological constant from Planckian fluctuations and the averaging procedure},
  author = {Stefano Viaggiu},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1910.12463},
  year   = {2019}
}

Comments

Accepted for publicationa in Foundations of Physics