Related papers: QED Vacuum Loops and Dark Energy
It has recently been proposed that vacuum energy is zero in spite of the quantum-field fluctuations that occur everywhere, even at absolute zero. The implication is that dark energy must have a different origin, unrelated to vacuum energy.…
We consider a variant of Hybrid Inflation, where inflation is driven by two interacting scalar fields, one of which has a `Mexican hat' potential and the other a quartic potential. Given the appropriate initial conditions one of the fields…
The today estimated value of dark energy can be achieved by the vacuum condensate induced by neutrino mixing phenomenon. Such a tiny value is recovered for a cut-off of the order of Planck scale and it is linked to the sub eV neutrino mass…
The static Coulomb potential of Quantum Electrodynamics (QED) is calculated in the presence of a strong magnetic field in the lowest Landau level (LLL) approximation using two different methods. First, the vacuum expectation value of the…
Quantum field theory allows for the suppression of vacuum fluctuations, leading to sub-vacuum phenomena. One of these is the appearance of local negative energy density. Selected aspects of negative energy will be reviewed, including the…
The vacuum condensate due to neutrino and quark mixing behaves as a perfect fluid and, at the present epoch, as a cosmological constant. The very small breaking of the Lorentz invariance constrains today the value of the dark energy.
The effect of vacuum birefringence is one of the first predictions of quantum electrodynamics (QED): the presence of a charged Dirac field makes the vacuum birefringent when threaded by magnetic fields. This effect, extremely weak for…
The concept of an all pervading Aether is age old, and contrary to popular belief, it survived the twentieth century too though with different nuances. Using this concept of a background Quantum Vacuum, the author in 1997 proposed a…
We investigate large-scale inhomogeneity of dark energy in the bubble nucleation scenario of the universe. In this scenario, the present universe was created by a bubble nucleation due to quantum tunneling from a metastable ancestor vacuum,…
The vacuum fluctuations of all quantum fields filling the universe are supposed to leave enormous energy and pressure contributions which are incompatible with observations. It has been recently suggested that, when the effective nature of…
We show that vector theories on cosmological scales are excellent candidates for dark energy. We consider two different examples, both are theories with no dimensional parameters nor potential terms, with natural initial conditions in the…
In this paper we consider external current QED in the Coulomb gauge and in axial gauges for various spatial directions of the axis. For a non-zero electric charge of the current, we demonstrate that any two different gauges from this class…
We calculate the time evolution of the expectation value of the energy-momentum tensor for a minimally-coupled massless scalar field in cosmological spacetimes, with an application to dark energy in mind. We first study the evolution from…
We consider the generic scenario of dark energy which arises through the latent heat of a hidden sector first order cosmological phase transition. This field could account for the extra radiation degree of freedom suggested by the CMB. We…
Recent determinations of the equation of state of dark energy hint that this may well be of the phantom type, i.e., $w_{de} < -1$. If confirmed by future experiments, this would strongly point to the existence of fields that violate the…
For a flat universe presently dominated by static or dynamic vacuum energy, cosmological constant (LCDM) or quintessence (QCDM), we calculate the asymptotic collapsed mass fraction as function of the present ratio of smooth energy to matter…
In the data of the ether-drift experiments there might be sizable fluctuations superposed on the smooth sinusoidal modulations due to the Earth's rotation and orbital revolution. These fluctuations might reflect the stochastic nature of the…
The black-hole evaporation implies that the quantum-field propagators in a local Minkowski frame acquire a correction, which gives rise to this process. The modification of the propagators causes, in turn, non-trivial local effects due to…
It is known that theories of phantom dark energy, considered as quantum fields, predict a continuous production of positive- plus negative-energy particles, from spontaneous decay of the vacuum. We show that this can be a new source of…
In this talk I present recent studies on vacuum polarization energies and energy densities induced by QED flux tubes. I focus on comparing three and four dimensional scenarios and the discussion of various approximation schemes in view of…