Related papers: Some Remarks on Anthropic Approaches to the Strong…
The accelerating expansion of the Universe points to a small positive value for the cosmological constant or vacuum energy density. We discuss recent ideas that the cosmological constant plus LHC results might hint at critical phenomena…
In this paper, dark energy is modelled via a spherically symmetric quintessence scalar field $\varphi$, the dynamics of which are found to be analogous to a pendulum. This is due to a driving axion potential $V(\left|\varphi\right|)$, whose…
We identify 31 dimensionless physical constants required by particle physics and cosmology, and emphasize that both microphysical constraints and selection effects might help elucidate their origin. Axion cosmology provides an instructive…
In this lecture I make some educated guesses, about the landscape of string theory vacua. Based on the recent work of a number of authors, it seems plausible that the lanscape is unimaginably large and diverse. Whether we like it or not,…
Anthropic solutions to the cosmological constant problem require seemingly unnatural scalar field potentials with a very small slope or domain walls (branes) with a very small coupling to a four-form field. Here we introduce a class of…
A recent paper "What can solve the strong CP problem?" goes counter to conventional wisdom by arguing that the universe was in an initial state that combines different eigenstates of $\theta$ (of the theta vacuum of QCD), and asserts that…
There is some evidence that the Universe is presently undergoing accelerating expansion. This has restored some credit to the scenarios with a non-vanishing cosmological constant. From the point of view of a theory of fundamental…
The axion solution of the strong CP problem provides a number of possible windows to physics beyond the standard model, notably in the form of searches for solar axions and for galactic axion dark matter, but in a broader context also…
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…
While $CP$ violation has never been observed in the strong interactions, the QCD Lagrangian admits a $CP$-odd topological interaction proportional to the so called $\theta$ angle, which weighs the contributions to the partition function…
We explore local consequences of a non-zero cosmological constant on astrophysical structures. We find that the effects are not only sensitive to the density of the configurations but also to the geometry. For non-homogeneous…
Prediction in quantum cosmology requires a specification of the universe's quantum dynamics and its quantum state. We expect only a few general features of the universe to be predicted with probabilities near unity conditioned on the…
After a short history of the $\Lambda$-term it is explained why the (effective) cosmological constant is expected to obtain contributions from short-distance-physics, corresponding to an energy scale of at least 100 GeV. The actual tiny…
The spacial expansion of the universe could be described as a tendency for satisfying holographic equipartition which inevitably demands the presence of dark energy. We explore whether this novel idea proposed by Padmanabhan give any…
We consider two problems that have vexed physicists for several decades -- dark matter and the cosmological constant. The problem has been that the former has not been detected while the latter gives a far higher value than detected by…
Invoking the Peccei-Quinn (PQ) solution to the strong CP problem substitutes the puzzle of why $\theta_{qcd}$ is so small with the puzzle of why the PQ symmetry is of such high quality. Cosmological and astrophysical considerations raise…
Physics invites the idea that space contains energy whose gravitational effect approximates that of Einstein's cosmological constant, Lambda; nowadays the concept is termed dark energy or quintessence. Physics also suggests the dark energy…
Dark matter constitutes about $23\%$ of the total energy density of the universe but its properties are still little known besides that it should be composed by cold and weakly interacting particles. Many beyond standard model theories can…
In this colloquium-level account, I describe the cosmological constant problem: why is the energy of empty space at least 60 orders of magnitude smaller than several known contributions to it from the Standard Model of particle physics? I…
Ideas from causal set theory lead to a fluctuating, time dependent cosmological-constant of the right order of magnitude to match currently quoted "dark energy" values. Although such a term was predicted some time ago, a more detailed…