Related papers: The Weight of Vacuum Fluctuations
The possibility of the effect of electromagnetic radiation (hereinafter - radiation from vacuum) due to the interaction of zero-point vacuum fluctuations with free charged particles accelerated at relativistic speeds in electric or magnetic…
A central aspect of the cosmological constant problem is to understand why vacuum energy does not gravitate. In order to account for this observation, while allowing for nontrivial dynamics of the quantum vacuum, we motivate a novel…
We define the notion of energy, and compute its values, for gravitational systems involving terms quadratic in curvature. While our construction parallels that of ordinary Einstein gravity, there are significant differences both…
The equations of motion for matter fields are invariant under the shift of the matter lagrangian by a constant. Such a shift changes the energy momentum tensor of matter by T^a_b --> T^a_b +\rho \delta^a_b. In the conventional approach,…
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…
The fluctuations of the vacuum energy are treated as a non-equilibrium process and a stochastic model for the cosmological constant is presented, which yields a natural explanation for the smallness or zero value of the constant in the…
Quantum fluctuations of a real massless scalar field are studied in the context of the Generalized Uncertainty Principle (GUP). The dynamical finite vacuum energy is found in spatially flat Friedmann-Robertson- Walker (FRW) spacetime which…
Although the prospect is more plausible than it might appear, the answer to the title question is, unfortunately, "probably not." Quantum fluctuations of vacuum energy can focus light, and while the effect is tiny, the distribution of…
We consider a linearized, effective quantum theory of gravitation in which gravity weakens at energies higher than ~10^-3 eV in order to accommodate the apparent smallness of the cosmological constant. Such a theory predicts departures from…
Using Heisenberg's uncertainty principle it is shown that the gravitational stability condition for a crystalline vacuum cosmic space implies to obtain an equation formally equivalent to the relation first used by Gamow to predict the…
We consider the effects of the quantum stress tensor fluctuations of a conformal field in generating gravity waves in inflationary models. We find a non-scale invariant, non-Gaussian contribution which depends upon the total expansion…
We study the effects of the electromagnetic vacuum on the motion of a nonrelativistic electron. First, we derive the equation of motion for the expectation value of the electron's position operator. We show how this equation has the same…
We analyze the classical linear gravitational effect of idealized pion-like dynamical systems, consisting of light quarks connected by attractive gluonic material with a stress-energy $p=-\rho c^2$ in one or more dimensions. In one orbit of…
This paper presents a new, non-Gaussian formulation of stochastic gravity by incorporating the higher moments of the fluctuations of the quantum stress energy tensor for a free quantum scalar field in a consistent way. A scheme is developed…
Recently some hidden inconsistencies in high energy physics and cosmology have been articulated by several scholars. If we follow the usual description we get an unacceptably high cosmological constant as was noticed by Weinberg and others…
We investigate the Lamb shift of centripetally accelerated atoms coupled to electromagnetic vacuum fluctuations. Focusing on a very small orbital radius (so that the tangential speed remains nonrelativistic and the proper centripetal…
We calculate the fluctuations in the current and energy densities for the case of a quantized, minimally coupled, massless, complex scalar field around a straight and infinitesimally thin cosmic string carrying magnetic flux. At zero…
The vacuum must contain virtual fluctuations of black hole microstates for each mass $M$. We observe that the expected suppression for $M\gg m_p$ is counteracted by the large number $Exp[S_{bek}]$ of such states. From string theory we learn…
For quantum fields on a curved spacetime with an Euclidean section, we derive a general expression for the stress energy tensor two-point function in terms of the effective action. The renormalized two-point function is given in terms of…
By example of a model with a spatially global scalar field, we show that the energy density of zero-point modes is exponentially suppressed by an average number of field quanta in a finite volume with respect to the energy density in the…