Related papers: Negative Energies and Field Theory
There appears to be three, perhaps related, ways of approaching the nature of vacuum energy . The first is to say that it is just the lowest energy state of a given, usually quantum, system. The second is to equate vacuum energy with the…
We argue that the ground state of a field theory, in the presence of charged particles, becomes an entangled state involving an infinity of soft photons. The quantum field vacuum is altered by the passage of a uniformly moving charge,…
The cosmological constant problem can be understood as the failure of the decoupling principle behind effective field theory, so that some quantities in the low-energy theory are extremely sensitive to the high-energy properties. While this…
Traditional quantum field theory can lead to enormous zero-point energy, which markedly disagrees with experiment. Unfortunately, this situation is built into conventional canonical quantization procedures. For identical classical theories,…
Is there an absolute cosmic electric potential?. The recent discovery of the accelerated expansion of the universe could be indicating that this is certainly the case. In this essay we show that the consistency of the covariant and gauge…
In this paper, we study implications of the geometrical nature of space- time for some of the basic tenets of quantum mechanics. That is, we study two different implications of the principle of general covariance; first we quantize a…
In quantum field theory it is generally known that the energy density may be negative at a given point in spacetime. A number of papers have shown that there is a restriction on this energy density which is called a quantum inequality (QI).…
It is commonly assumed that quantum field theory arises by applying ordinary quantum mechanics to the low energy effective degrees of freedom of a more fundamental theory defined at ultra-high-energy/short-wavelength scales. We shall argue…
In the semiclassical quantum gravity derived from the Wheeler-DeWitt equation, the energy density of a matter field loses quantum coherence due to the induced gauge potential from the parametric interaction with gravity in a non-static…
Starting from an (unknown) quantum gravitational model, one can invoke a sequence of approximations to progressively arrive at quantum field theory (QFT) in curved spacetime, QFT in flat spacetime, nonrelativistic quantum mechanics and…
In the framework of an effective field theory of general relativity a model of scalar and vector bosons interacting with the metric field is considered. It is shown in the framework of a two-loop order calculation that for the cosmological…
Till now, the foundation of quantum physics is still mysterious. To explore the mysteries in the foundation of quantum physics, people always take it for granted that quantum processes must be some types of fields/objects on a rigid space.…
The failure to calculate the vacuum energy is a central problem in theoretical physics. Presumably the problem arises from the insistent use of effective field theory reasoning in a context that is well beyond its intended scope. If one…
We compute for various perturbed conformal field theories the vacuum energies by means of the thermodynamic Bethe ansatz. Depending on the infrared and ultraviolet divergencies of the models, governed by the scaling dimensions of the…
A quantum field theory formalism is reviewed that leads to a self-consistent, finite quantum gravity, Yang-Mills and Higgs theory, which is unitary and gauge invariant to all orders of perturbation theory. The gauge hierarchy problem is…
The mystery of the cosmological constant is probably the most pressing obstacle to significantly improving the models of elementary particle physics derived from string theory. The problem arises because in the standard framework of low…
In this paper, we analyze the quantum vacuum in a radiation-dominated and CPT-invariant universe by further imposing the quantum states to be ultraviolet regular i.e., satisfying the Hadamard/adiabatic condition. For scalar fields, this is…
Quantum field theory is assumed to be gauge invariant. However it is well known that when certain quantities, such as the vacuum current, are calculated the results are not gauge invariant. The non-gauge invariant terms have to be removed…
In quantum field theory, there exist states in which the expectation value of the energy density for a quantized field is negative. These negative energy densities lead to many problems. Although quantum field theory introduces negative…
A model for the localized quantum vacuum is proposed in which the zero-point energy of the quantum electromagnetic field originates in energy- and momentum-conserving transitions of material systems from their ground state to an unstable…