Related papers: Gravothermal Catastrophe with a Cosmological Const…
We present here how the gravothermal or Antonov's instability, which was originally formulated in the microcanonical ensemble, is modified in the presence of a cosmological constant and in the canonical ensemble. In contrast to the…
Gravitational instabilities of isothermal spheres are studied in the presence of a positive or negative cosmological constant, in the Newtonian limit. In gravity, the statistical ensembles are not equivalent. We perform the analysis both in…
Thermodynamical stability of fluid spheres is studied in the presence of a cosmological constant, both in the Newtonian limit, as well as in General Relativity. In all cases, an increase of the cosmological constant tends to stabilize the…
The thermodynamic instabilities of the self-gravitating, classical ideal gas are studied in the case of static, spherically symmetric configurations in General Relativity taking into account the Tolman-Ehrenfest effect. One type of…
Newton's law gets modified in the presence of a cosmological constant by a small repulsive term (antigarvity) that is proportional to the distance. Assuming a value of the cosmological constant consistent with the recent SnIa data ($\Lambda…
Thermal energy points toward a disordered, completely uniform state acting counter to gravity's tendency to generate order and structure through gravitational collapse. It is, therefore, expected to contribute to the stabilization of a…
The observational evidence for the existence of a non-zero cosmological constant is getting stronger. It is therefore timely to address the question of its eventual effect on the dynamics of galaxies, clusters and larger structures in the…
We study a Newtonian cosmological model in the context of a noncommutative space. It is shown that the trajectories of a test particle undergo modifications such that it no longer satisfies the cosmological principle. For the case of a…
We consider a dynamical approach to the cosmological constant. There is a scalar field with a potential whose minimum occurs at a generic, but negative, value for the vacuum energy, and it has a non-standard kinetic term whose coefficient…
We consider the effect of a positive cosmological constant on spherical gravitational collapse to a black hole for a few simple, analytic cases. We construct the complete Oppenheimer-Snyder-deSitter (OSdS) spacetime, the generalization of…
In contrast to the phenomenon of nullification of the cosmological constant in the equilibrium vacuum, which is the general property of any quantum vacuum, there are many options in modifying the Einstein equation to allow the cosmological…
We explore the effects of a positive cosmological constant on astrophysical and cosmological configurations described by a polytropic equation of state. We derive the conditions for equilibrium and stability of such configurations and…
One of the most disturbing difficulties in thinking about the cosmological constant is that it is not stable under radiative corrections. The feedback mechanism proposed in [hep-th/0306108] is a dynamical way to protect a zero or small…
We revisit a scenario in which the cosmological constant is cancelled by the potential energy of a slowly evolving scalar field, or "cosmon". The cosmon's evolution is tied to the cosmological constant by a feedback mechanism. This feedback…
The gravitational instability, responsible for the formation of the structure of the Universe, occurs below energy thresholds and above spatial scales of a self-gravitating expanding region, when thermal energy can no longer counterbalance…
We propose a phenomenological approach to the cosmological constant problem based on generally covariant non-local and acausal modifications of four-dimensional gravity at enormous distances. The effective Newton constant becomes very small…
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…
We argue that the instability of Euclidean Einstein gravity is an indication that the vacuum is non perturbative and contains a condensate of the metric tensor in a manner reminiscent of Yang-Mills theories. As a simple step toward the…
Within thermodynamic models of gravity, where the universe is considered as a finite ensemble of quantum particles, cosmological constant in the Einstein's equations appears as a constant of integration. Then it can be bounded using…
We exhibit a mechanism which dynamically adjusts cosmological constant toward $0^+$. The adjustment is quantum-mechanical, discharging cosmological constant in random discrete steps. It renders de Sitter space unstable, and triggers its…