Related papers: Quantum vacuum fluctuations and dark energy
Physicists have speculated about the properties of the quantum vacuum for at least 85 years; however, only recently have they understood the quantum vacuum sufficiently well to begin making testable predictions. Specifically, using…
The gravitational back-reaction is calculated for the conformally invariant scalar field within a black cosmic string interior with cosmological constant. Using the perturbed metric, the gravitational effects of the quantum field are…
Dynamical vacuum energy or quintessence, a slowly varying and spatially inhomogeneous component of the energy density with negative pressure, is currently consistent with the observational data. One potential difficulty with the idea of…
Since Einstein's equations $G_{ij} = 8\pi \, G \, T_{ij} \, / c^4 $ relate the metric $g_{ij}$ of spacetime to the energy-momentum tensor $T_{ij}$ which is a quantum field, the metric $g_{ij}$ must be a quantum field. And since the metric…
The effective field theory of quantum gravity generically predicts non-locality to be present in the effective action, which results from the low-energy propagation of gravitons and massless matter. Working to second order in gravitational…
Quantum gravitational effects may induce stochastic fluctuations in the structure of space-time, to produce a characteristic foamy structure. It has been known for some time now that these fluctuations may have observable consequencies for…
An important yet perplexing result from work in the 90s and 00s is the near-unity value of the ratio of fluctuations in the vacuum energy density of quantum fields to the mean in a collection of generic spacetimes. This was done by way of…
It is found that the existence of spacetime foam leads to a situation in which the number of fundamental quantum bosonic fields is a variable quantity. The general aspects of an exact theory that allows for a variable number of fields are…
We examine the gravitational properties of Lamb shift energies. Using available experimental data we show that these energies have a standard gravitational behavior at the level of $\sim 10^{-5}$. We are motivated by the point of view that…
We show that in imaginary time quantum metric fluctuations of empty space form a self-consistent de Sitter gravitational instanton that can be thought of as describing tunneling from "nothing" into de Sitter space of real time (no…
In this dissertation, the nature of Dark Energy (DE) is examined from both theoretical and phenomenological perspectives. The possibility of DE being a dynamic quantity in quantum field theory (QFT) in curved spacetime is studied. The…
The vacuum is considered as some fluid emergent from the zero-point fluctuations of the quantum fields contributing to the vacuum energy density and pressure. The equation of vacuum state and the speed of vacuum sound-waves are deduced…
One of the greatest challenges of science is to understand the current accelerated expansion of the Universe. In this work, we show that by considering the quantum nature of the gravitational field, its wavelength can be associated with an…
We study the infrared effective theory of gravity that stems from the quantum trace anomaly. Quantum fluctuations of the metric induce running of the cosmological constant and the Newton constant at cosmological scales. By imposing the…
Gravitational anomalies such as the mine/borehole g anomaly, the near-flatness of the spiral galaxy rotation-velocity curves, currently interpreted as a `dark matter' effect, the absence of that effect in ordinary elliptical galaxies, and…
We derive the leading quantum corrections to the gravitational potentials in a de Sitter background, due to the vacuum polarization from loops of conformal fields. Our results are valid for arbitrary conformal theories, even strongly…
We show that a slowly varying Newton's constant, consistent with existing bounds, can potentially explain a host of observations pertaining to gravitational effects or phenomena across distances spanning from planetary to the cosmological,…
Our Universe has multiple examples of unexplained gravitational losses in black holes and neutron stars. As all of the space is squeezed out, nucleons are not easily compressible further. Gravitational loss will allow galactic black holes…
It was recently suggested (arxiv:2410.06604) that the small value of the dark energy of the universe could be explained in terms of the scale of neutrino masses through a simple quantum field theoretic mechanism. I clarify that the quantity…
The cosmological constant problem is the principal obstacle in the attempt to interpret dark energy as the quantum vacuum energy. We suggest that the obstacle can be removed, i.e. that the cosmological constant problem can be resolved by…