Related papers: How to Hide a Cosmological Constant
I briefly review the cosmological constant problem and the issue of dark energy (or quintessence). Within the framework of quantum field theory, the vacuum expectation value of the energy momentum tensor formally diverges as $k^4$. A cutoff…
We derive strong observational limits on any possible large-scale spatial variation in the values of physical 'constants' whose space-time evolution is driven by a scalar field. The limits are imposed by the isotropy of the microwave…
Spacetime undergoes quantum fluctuations, giving rise to spacetime foam, a.k.a. quantum foam. We discuss some properties of spacetime foam, and point out the conceptual interconnections in the physics of quantum foam, black holes, and…
It is found that the existence of spacetime foam leads to a situation in which the number of fundamental quantum bosonic fields is a variable quantity. The general aspects of an exact theory that allows for a variable number of fields are…
In the saddle point approximation, the Euclidean path integral for quantum gravity closely resembles a thermodynamic partition function, with the cosmological constant $\Lambda$ playing the role of temperature and the ``density of…
We point out that for a large class of universes, holography implies that the most probable value of the cosmological constant is zero. In four spacetime dimensions, the probability distribution takes the Baum-Hawking form,…
A phenomenological model is proposed to explain the recent observed cosmological variation of the fine structure constant as an effect of the quantum vacuum, assuming a flat universe with cosmological constant $\Lambda$ in the cases…
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 variety of observations indicate that the universe is dominated by dark energy with negative pressure, one possibility for which is a cosmological constant. If the dark energy is a cosmological constant, a fundamental question is: Why has…
We study the role of the cosmological constant (CC) as a component of dark energy (DE). It is argued that the cosmological term is in general unavoidable and it should not be ignored even when dynamical DE sources are considered. From the…
The cosmological constant is estimated by considering the surface tension of supervoids in a void-dominated cosmic fluid by which we can get a possible source of dark energy. Looking at voids as bubbles, we define the concept of surface…
The cosmological constant, also known as dark energy, was believed to be caused by vacuum fluctuations, but naive calculations give results in stark disagreement with fact. In the Casimir effect, vacuum fluctuations cause forces in…
The value of the cosmological constant arising from a crystalline model for vacuum cosmic space with lattice parameter of the order of the neutron radius [1] has been calculated. The model allows to solve, in an easy way, the problem of the…
In previous work, q-theory was introduced to describe the gravitating macroscopic behavior of a conserved microscopic variable q. In this article, the gluon condensate of quantum chromodynamics is considered in terms of q-theory. The…
Quantum fluctuations of the vacuum are both a surprising and fundamental phenomenon of nature. Understood as virtual photons flitting in and out of existence, they still have a very real impact, \emph{e.g.}, in the Casimir effects and the…
The cosmological term is assumed to be a function of time such as $\Lambda =Ba^{-2}$ where a(t) means the scale factor of standard cosmology. Analytical solutions for radiation dominated epoch and open universe are found. For closed…
The origins of the cosmological constant are discussed from the perspective of the imaginary-time field theory. The concept of the thermal time, which is related to the Tolman-Ehrehfest relation, and the conformal invariance of the actions…
In this paper the results obtained by Minic and his colleagues on the uncertainty relation of the pair "cosmological constant - volume of space-time", where cosmological constant is a dynamical quantity, are reconsidered and generalized…
It is suggested that the vacuum expectation of the quantum vacuum energy-momentum is zero, but quantum fluctuations give rise to a space-time curvature equivalent to that of a cosmological constant or dark energy. Calculations within…
The typical scalar field theory has a cosmological constant problem. We propose a generic mechanism by which this problem is avoided at tree level by embedding the theory into a larger theory. The metric and the scalar field coupling…