Related papers: A resolution of the cosmological constant problem
In discussions of the cosmological constant, the Casimir effect is often invoked as decisive evidence that the zero point energies of quantum fields are "real''. On the contrary, Casimir effects can be formulated and Casimir forces can be…
This article aims at discussing the cosmological constant problem at a pedagogical but fully technical level. We review how the vacuum energy can be regularized in flat and curved space-time and how it can be understood in terms of Feynman…
The action for gravity and the standard model includes, as well as the positive energy fermion and boson fields, negative energy fields. The Hamiltonian for the action leads through a positive and negative energy symmetry of the vacuum to a…
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…
Whereas the total energy in zero-point fluctuations of the particle physics vacuum gives rise to the cosmological constant problem, differences in the vacuum give rise to real physical phenomena, such as the Casimir effect. Hence we…
A huge discrepancy between the zero-point energy calculated from quantum theory and the observed quantity in the Universe has been one of the most illusive problems in physics. In order to examine the measurability of zero-point energy, we…
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,…
We discuss how we remove a huge discrepancy between the theory of a cosmological constant, due to the zero-point energies of matter fields, and the observation. The technique of dimensional regularization plays a decisive role. We…
Considering the fundamental cutoff applied by the uncertainty relations' limit on virtual particles' frequency in the quantum vacuum, it is shown that the vacuum energy density is proportional to the inverse of the forth power of the…
A quantum field theory has finite zero-point energy if the sum over all boson modes $b$ of the $n$th power of the boson mass $ m_b^n $ equals the sum over all fermion modes $f$ of the $n$th power of the fermion mass $ m_f^n $ for $n= 0$, 2,…
In a recent paper [1] the Casimir energy was calculated for a massive dirac field in (1+1) dimensional space-time in the presence of an inverse square well potential and shown to be positive. It will be shown that this result violates a key…
We discuss the main myths related to the vacuum energy and cosmological constant, such as: ``unbearable lightness of space-time''; the dominating contribution of zero point energy of quantum fields to the vacuum energy; non-zero vacuum…
Quantum field theory predicts that vacuum energy (or what is the same, cosmological constant) should be 50-100 orders of magnitude larger than the existing astronomical limit. A very brief review of possible solutions of this problem is…
In order to clarify why the zero-point energy associated with the vacuum fluctuations cannot be a candidate for the dark energy in the universe, a comparison with the Casimir effect is analyzed in some detail. A principle of epistemology is…
The discussion of vacuum energy is currently a subject of great theoretical importance, specially concerning the cosmological constant problem in General Relativity. From Quantum Field Theory, it is stated that vacuum states subject to…
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…
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…
It is argued that the zero-point energies of free quantum fields diverge at most quadratically and not quartically, as is generally believed. This is a consequence of the relativistic invariance which requires that the energy density of the…
The Casimir effect is a physical manifestation of zero point energy of quantum vacuum. In a relativistic quantum field theory, Poincar\'e symmetry of the theory seems, at first sight, to imply that non-zero vacuum energy is inconsistent…
In addition to the two standard solutions of the quantum field equations having the form e^{+/-(iwt-ikx)}, there exist two additional solutions of the form e^{+/-(iwt+ikx). By incorporating these latter solutions, deemed "supplemental…