Related papers: Cosmology of gravitational vacuum
There are, at present, several gravitational and cosmological anomalies; the dark energy problem, the lambda problem, accelerating cosmological expansion, the anomalous Pioneer spacecraft acceleration, a spin-up of the Earth and an apparent…
Black holes are an apparently unavoidable prediction of classical General Relativity, at least if matter obeys the strong energy condition rho + 3p > 0. However quantum vacuum fluctuations generally violate this condition, as does the eq.…
We review the study of inhomogeneous perturbations about a homogeneous and isotropic background cosmology. We adopt a coordinate based approach, but give geometrical interpretations of metric perturbations in terms of the expansion, shear…
We consider the quantization of space-times which can possess different topologies within a symmetry reduced version of Wheeler-DeWitt theory. The quantum states are defined from a natural decomposition as an outer-product of a topological…
It seems generic to have vacua with lower dimensionality than ours. We consider the possibility that the observable universe originated in a transition from one of these vacua. Such a universe has anisotropic spatial curvature. This may be…
We suggest an alternative framework for interpreting the current state of the visible universe. Our approach is based on a dynamical ``Cosmological Constant'' and the starting point is that a decaying vacuum produces matter. As we point…
In the theories, in which dynamic gravitational field emerges from the underlying matter fields, the gravitational field can be considered as a part of matter. Using this approach, we construct the thermodynamics of the homogeneous…
Positive vacuum energy together with extra dimensions of space imply that our four-dimensional Universe is unstable, generically to decompactification of the extra dimensions. Either quantum tunneling or thermal fluctuations carry one past…
The expansion of our universe, when followed backward in time, implies that it emerged from a phase of huge density, the big bang. These stages are so extreme that classical general relativity combined with matter theories is not able to…
Quantum theory, general relativity, the standard model of particle physics, and the $\Lambda$CDM model of cosmology have all been spectacularly successful within their respective regimes of applicability, but many central problems remain…
Perhaps the deepest mystery of our accelerating Universe in expansion is the existence of a tiny and rigid cosmological constant, $\Lambda$. Its size is many orders of magnitude below the expected one in the standard model of particle…
It is shown that isotropic cosmology in the Riemann-Cartan spacetime allows to solve the problem of cosmological singularity as well as the problems of invisible matter components - dark energy and dark matter. All cosmological models…
Using an approximate solution to the $N$-body problem in general relativity, and the \emph{principle of local isotropy at any point}, we construct a cosmological model, with zero curvature, for a universe composed uniquely by collision-less…
Whether or not space-time is fundamentally discrete is of central importance for the development of the theory of quantum gravity. If the fundamental description of space-time is discrete, typically represented in terms of a graph or…
The self-gravitating systems are formed by particles interacting through gravity. They describe structure formation in the universe. As a consequence of the long range interaction of gravity, they are inhomogeneous even at thermal…
We examine the cosmological sector of a gauge theory of gravity based on the SO(4,2) conformal group of Minkowski space. We allow for conventional matter coupled to the spacetime metric as well as matter coupled to the field that gauges…
The perfect Planck spectrum of the observed cosmic microwave background radiation indicates that our universe must be in thermal equilibrium. The dark sector of the universe should also be in the same equilibrium state with dark matter and…
We speculate about the spacetime description due to the presence of Lorentzian wormholes (handles in spacetime joining two distant regions or other universes) in quantum gravity. The semiclassical rate of production of these Lorentzian…
It is shown that a first-order cosmological perturbation theory for the open, flat and closed Friedmann-Lema\^itre-Robertson-Walker universes admits one, and only one, gauge-invariant variable which describes the perturbation to the energy…
I show that the de Sitter Equilibrium cosmology generically predicts observable levels of curvature in the Universe today. The predicted value of the curvature depends only on the ratio of the density of non-relativistic matter to energy…