Related papers: $\infty-\infty$: vacuum energy and virtual black-h…
In this letter, we consider the possibility of reconciling metric theories of gravitation with violation of the conservation of energy-momentum. Under some circumstances, this can be achieved in the context of unimodular gravity, and it…
A new covariant generalization of Einstein's general relativity is developed which allows the existence of a term proportional to $T_{\alpha\beta}T^{\alpha\beta}$ in the action functional of the theory ($T_{\alpha\beta}$ is the…
There is a viable vector-tensor gravity (VTG) theory, whose vector field produces repulsive forces leading to important effects. In the background universe, the effect of these forces is an accelerated expansion identical to that produced…
The existence of irreducible field fluctuations in vacuum is an important prediction of quantum theory. These fluctuations have many observable consequences, like the Casimir effect which is now measured with good accuracy and agreement…
Special theory of relativity has been formulated in a vacuum momentum-energy representation which is equivalent to Einstein special relativity and predicts just the same results as it. Although in this sense such a formulation would be at…
We have obtained a generalization of the hydrodynamic theory of vacuum in the context of general relativity. While retaining the Lagrangian character of general relativity, the new theory provides a natural alternative to the view that the…
A short review about vacuum energy and the cosmological constant is presented. The observed acceleration of the universe introduces a new meV energy scale. The problem is that, theoretically, the predicted vacuum energy is many orders of…
We extend the study of the effect of static primordial black holes on vacuum decay. In particular, we compare the tunneling rates between vacua of different values of the cosmological constant and black hole mass by pointing out the…
In our recently proposed quantum theory of gravity, the universe is made of `atoms' of space-time-matter (STM). Planck scale foam is composed of STM atoms with Planck length as their associated Compton wave-length. The quantum dispersion…
Perfectly conducting boundaries, and their Dirichlet counterparts for quantum scalar fields, predict nonintegrable energy densities. A more realistic model with a finite ultraviolet cutoff yields two inconsistent values for the force on a…
We propose a new way to relate the black hole thermodynamics and geometry by generalizing the Euclidean formalism to include "virtual geometries", which do not necessarily satisfy Einstein equations. This provides a physically well…
As shown recently 2d quantum gravity theories -- including spherically reduced Einstein-gravity -- after an exact path integral of its geometric part can be treated perturbatively in the loops of (scalar) matter. Obviously the classical…
We study the properties of a class of quantum field theories endowed with an equal number of anti commuting and commuting field variables, the most common example being the supersymmetric models. Based on the scaling properties of the…
We discuss the weight of vacuum energy in various contexts. First, we compute the vacuum energy for flat spacetimes of the form $\mathbb{T}^3 \times \mathbb{R}$, where $\mathbb{T}^3$ stands for a general 3-torus. We discover a quite simple…
Firstly, we review the pointwise and averaged energy conditions, the quantum inequality and the notion of the ``volume integral quantifier'', which provides a measure of the ``total amount'' of energy condition violating matter. Secondly,…
In this paper we address the issue of determining the semiclassical threshold for black hole formation in the context of a one-parameter family of theories which continuously interpolates between the RST and BPP models. We find that the…
We rederive the universal bound on entropy with the help of black holes while allowing for Unruh--Wald buoyancy. We consider a box full of entropy lowered towards and then dropped into a Reissner--Nordstr\"om black hole in equilibrium with…
We conjecture that black holes, whether accreting matter or not, can also lose mass to phantom energy production. Such a process can be made plausible in theories that allow for non-local connections between short and long wavelength modes.…
We consider the vacuum energy of massive quantum fields in an expanding universe. We define a conserved renormalized energy-momentum tensor by means of a comoving cutoff regularization. Using exact solutions for de Sitter space-time, we…
Vacuum Einstein theory in three spacetime dimensions is locally trivial, but admits many solutions that are globally different, particularly if there is a negative cosmological constant. The classical theory of such locally "anti-de Sitter"…