Related papers: The Cosmological Constant and Horava-Lifshitz Grav…
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 essay we offer a comprehensible overview of the gravitational aether scenario. This is a possible extension of Einstein's theory of relativity to the quantum regime via an effective approach. Quantization of gravity usually faces…
Recent astrophysical observations seem to indicate that the cosmological constant is small but nonzero and positive. The old cosmological constant problem asks why it is so small; we must now ask, in addition, why it is nonzero (and is in…
The cosmological constant, i.e., the energy density stored in the true vacuum state of all existing fields in the Universe, is the simplest and the most natural possibility to describe the current cosmic acceleration. However, despite its…
The standard formulation of the cosmological constant problem is based on one critical assumption---the spacetime is homogeneous and isotropic, which is true only on cosmological scales. However, this problem is caused by extremely small…
We present a simple algebraic argument for the conclusion that the low energy limit of a quantum theory of gravity must be a theory invariant, not under the Poincare group, but under a deformation of it parameterized by a dimensional…
Ho\v{r}ava-Lifshitz gravity has been proposed as a ghost-free quantum gravity model candidate with an anisotropic UV-scaling between space and time. We present here a cosmological background analysis of two different formulations of the…
For any fundamental quantum field theory, unitarity, renormalizability, and relativistic invariance are considered to be essential properties. Unitarity is inevitably connected to the probabilistic interpretation of the quantum theory,…
In addressing the cosmological constant problem, we propose that the discrepancy between the theoretical and observed values can be ascribed to the inherent uncertainty in the spacetime metric. Mach's principle, which posits that mass…
I review the problem of dark energy focusing on the cosmological constant as the candidate and discuss its implications for the nature of gravity. Part 1 briefly overviews the currently popular `concordance cosmology' and summarises the…
We present technical results which extend previous work and show that the cosmological constant of general relativity is an artefact of the reduction to 4D of 5D Kaluza-Klein theory (or 10D superstrings and 11D supergravity). We argue that…
We suggest a new perspective on the Cosmological Constant Problem by scrutinizing its standard formulation. In classical and quantum mechanics without gravity, there is no definition of the zero point of energy. Furthermore, the Casimir…
In this article the cosmological constant problems, as well as the astronomical evidence for a cosmologically significant homogeneous exotic energy density with negative pressure (quintessence), are reviewed for a broad audience of…
Quantum gravity places entirely new challenges on the formulation of a consistent theory as well as on an extraction of potentially observable effects. Quantum corrections due to the gravitational field are commonly expected to be tiny…
The cosmological constant problem is explained by a theory based on the discrete space-time hypothesis. The calculated cosmological constant value is of the order of 10^-52[m]^-2 or equivalent to about 0.7 of the critical mass density. It…
We look for a Brans-Dicke type of generalization of the Horava-Lifshitz gravity. It is shown that such a generalization is possible within the detailed balance condition. Classically, the resulting theory reduces in the IR limit to the…
We modify the Einstein-Schrodinger theory to include a cosmological constant $\Lambda_z$ which multiplies the symmetric metric, and we show how the theory can be easily coupled to additional fields. The cosmological constant $\Lambda_z$ is…
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 cosmological constant problem is one of the long-standing issues of modern physics. While we can measure the value of the cosmological constant with great accuracy, we are not able to calculate it in a coherent theoretical framework. On…
We discuss the linearization of Einstein equations in the presence of a cosmological constant, by expanding the solution for the metric around a flat Minkowski space-time. We demonstrate that one can find consistent solutions to the…