Related papers: Gravitational Aether and the thermodynamic solutio…
We showed that the principle of nongravitating vacuum energy, when formulated in the first order formalism, solves the cosmological constant problem. The most appealing formulation of the theory displays a local symmetry associated with the…
I try to revive, and possibly reconcile, a debate started a few years ago, about the relative roles of a bare cosmological constant and of a vacuum energy, by taking the attitude to try to get the most from the physics now available as…
I show that the gravitational dynamics in a bulk region of space can be connected to a thermodynamic description in the boundary of that region, thereby providing clear physical interpretations of several mathematical features of classical…
A new vision of the beginning and expansion of our universe has produced a solution to the vacuum energy problem (also known as "cosmological constant problem"). A new dynamic of cellular spaces and a discrete time has space being produced…
It will be argued here that the cosmological constant problem exists because of the way the vacuum is defined in quantum field theory. It has been known for some time that for QFT to be gauge invariant certain terms--such as part of the…
It is well-known that quantum field theory (QFT) induces a huge value of the cosmological constant, $\Lambda$, which is outrageously inconsistent with cosmological observations. We review here some aspects of this fundamental theoretical…
We study physics concerning the cosmological constant problem in the framework of effective field theory and suggest that a dominant part of dark energy can originate from gravitational corrections of vacuum energy, under the assumption…
A exact de Sitter-like cosmological solution of quadratic gravitation with torsion has been found. In the limit of constant energy and pressure, it becomes a exact de Sitter spacetime. It exists in a wide class of quadratic gravity theories…
I briefly discuss the challenges presented by attempting to modify general relativity to obtain an explanation for the observed accelerated expansion of the universe. Foremost among these are the questions of theoretical consistency - the…
In a recent paper (Phys. Rev. D95, 103504 (2017)) it is argued that, due to the fluctuations around its mean value, vacuum energy gravitates differently from what previously assumed. As a consequence, the universe would accelerate with a…
We follow a low-energy effective theory approach to identify the general class of theories that describes a vector field (of unconstrained norm) coupled to gravity. The resulting set may be regarded as a generalization of the conventional…
We show that there is a phenomenologically and theoretically consistent limit of the generic Einstein-Aether theory in which the Einstein-Aether field equations reduce to Einstein field equations with a perfect fluid distribution sourced by…
The stress-energy tensor of the quantum vacuum is studied for the particular case of quantum electrodynamics (QED), that is a fictituous universe where only the electromagnetic and the electron-positron fields exist. The integrals involved…
The concept of exotic charged dust is introduced here to represent dark matter. The term "exotic" means that the dust is not composed of normal matter, and the charge--for lack of a better term--is not an electric charge. It is also shown…
We formulate the classical gravitational entropy of a horizon as a Noether charge that does not require the notion of a temperature, and which is applicable to horizons that are not necessarily associated with black holes. This introduces a…
We consider a theory of gravity with a hidden extra-dimension and metric-dependent torsion. A set of physically motivated constraints are imposed on the geometry so that the torsion stays confined to the extra-dimension and the…
We analyse the Einstein-Cartan gravity in its standard form cal-R = R + cal-K^2, where cal-R and R are the Ricci scalar curvatures in the Einstein-Cartan and Einstein gravity, respectively, and cal-K^2 is the quadratic contribution of…
The old cosmological constant problem is to understand why the vacuum energy is so small; the new problem is to understand why it is comparable to the present mass density. Several approaches to these problems are reviewed. Quintessence…
One way the ultraviolet problem may be solved is explicit physical regularization. In this scenario, QFT is only the long distance limit of some unknown non-Poincare-invariant microscopic theory. One can ask how complex and contrived such…
In previous work, q-theory was introduced to describe the gravitating macroscopic behavior of a conserved microscopic variable q. In this article, the gluon condensate of quantum chromodynamics is considered in terms of q-theory. The…