Related papers: Hiding the cosmological constant
More than 65 years ago, John Wheeler suggested that quantum uncertainties of the metric would be of order one at the Planck scale, leading to large fluctuations in spacetime geometry and topology, which he termed "spacetime foam." In this…
Astronomical observations of distant quasars may be important to test models for quantum gravity, which posit Planck-scale spatial uncertainties ('spacetime foam') that would produce phase fluctuations in the wavefront of radiation emitted…
A diverse set of observations now compellingly suggest that Universe possesses a nonzero cosmological constant. In the context of quantum-field theory a cosmological constant corresponds to the energy density of the vacuum, and the wanted…
Quantum liquids, in which an effective Lorentzian metric and thus some kind of gravity gradually arise in the low-energy corner, are the objects where the problems related to the quantum vacuum can be investigated in detail. In particular,…
The vacuum is full of virtual particles which exist for short moments of time. In this paper we construct a chaotic model of vacuum fluctuations associated with a fundamental entropic field that generates an arrow of time. The dynamics can…
Due to quantum fluctuations, probed at small scales, spacetime is very complicated -- something akin in complexity to a turbulent froth which the late John Wheeler dubbed quantum foam, aka spacetime foam. Our recent work suggests that (1)…
Observations indicate that the universe is effectively flat, but they do not rule out a closed universe. The role of positive curvature is negligible at late times, but can be crucial in the early universe. In particular, positive curvature…
Quantum gravity "foam", among its various generic Lorentz non-invariant effects, would cause neutrino mixing. It is shown here that, if the foam is manifested as a nonrenormalizable effect at scale M, the oscillation length generically…
In this paper we present a framework in which the relational description of General Relativity can be used to smoothly continue cosmological dynamical systems through the Big Bang without invoking quantum gravity effects. Cosmological…
We review some of the history and properties of theories for the variation of the gravitation and fine structure 'constants'. We highlight some general features of the cosmological models that exist in these theories with reference to…
In a new model that we proposed, nonperturbative vacuum contributions to the effective action of a free quantized massive scalar field lead to a cosmological solution in which the scalar curvature becomes constant after a time $t_j$ (when…
It is shown that topological changes in space-time are necessary to make General Relativity compatible with the Newtonian limit and to solve the hierarchy of the fundamental interactions. We detail how topology and topological changes…
One aspect of the quantum nature of spacetime is its "foaminess" at very small scales. Many models for spacetime foam are defined by the accumulation power $\alpha$, which parameterizes the rate at which Planck-scale spatial uncertainties…
These four lectures cover four topics in modern cosmology: the cosmological constant, the cosmic microwave background, inflation, and cosmology as a probe of physics at the Planck scale. The underlying theme is that cosmology gives us a…
Planck-scale quantum spacetime undergoes probabilistic local curvature fluctuations whose distributions cannot explicitly depend on position otherwise vacuum's small-scale quantum structure would fail to be statistically homogeneous. Since…
The current expansion of the Universe has been observed to be accelerating, and the widely accepted spatially-flat concordance model of general relativistic cosmology attributes this phenomenon to a constant dark energy, a cosmological…
The traditional "explanation" for the observed acceleration of the universe is the existence of a positive cosmological constant. However, this can hardly be a truly convincing explanation, as an expanding universe is not expected to have a…
Quantum gravitational effects in loop quantum cosmology lead to a resolution of the initial singularity and have the potential to solve the horizon problem and generate a quasi scale-invariant spectrum of density fluctuations. We consider…
The quantum field theory prediction of the cosmological constant is 120 orders of magnitude higher than the observed value. This is known as the cosmological constant problem. Here, we deal with the cosmological constant as a scalar field…
First a Friedmann-Robertson-Walker (FRW) universe filled with dust and a conformally invariant scalar field is quantized. For the closed model we find a discrete set of wormhole quantum states. In the case of flat spacelike sections we find…