Related papers: The case for a Casimir cosmology
We abandon the interpretation that time is a global parameter in quantum mechanics, replace it by a quantum dynamical variable playing the role of time. This operational re-interpretation of time provides a solution to the cosmological…
We advance the viewpoint that only relevant modes of the vacuum fluctuations, namely, with wavelengths conditioned by the size, homogeneity, geometry and topology of the Universe, do contribute into the cosmological constant. A formula is…
It is well-known that in unimodular gravity the cosmological constant is not sourced by a constant energy density, but rather appears as some sort of integration constant. In this work we try to flesh this out by studying in some detail a…
The observed value of the cosmological constant poses large theoretical problems. We find that topology of the Universe provides a natural source for it. Restricting dynamically an Einstein-Cartan gravity to General Relativity in our…
Under the assumption that the cosmological constant vanishes in the true ground state with lowest possible energy density, we argue that the observed small but finite vacuum-like energy density can be explained if we consider a theory with…
The force experienced by objects embedded in a correlated medium undergoing thermal fluctuations--the so-called fluctuation--induced force--is actually itself a fluctuating quantity. We compute the corresponding probability distribution and…
From an observational perspective cosmology is today in excellent shape - advances in instrumentation and data processing have enabled us to study the universe in detail back to when the first galaxies formed, map the fluctuations in the…
Although Casimir, or quantum vacuum, forces between distinct bodies, or self-stresses of individual bodies, have been calculated by a variety of different methods since 1948, they have always been plagued by divergences. Some of these…
We consider that the cosmological constant is associated with the vacuum energy density of a particle physics model. In the path integral formalism of euclidean quantum gravity and in the background of the Robertson Walker metric we…
In addressing the cosmological constant problem, we propose that the discrepancy between the theoretical and observed values can be ascribed to the inherent uncertainty in the spacetime metric. Mach's principle, which posits that mass…
The standard formulation of the cosmological constant problem is based on one critical assumption---the spacetime is homogeneous and isotropic, which is true only on cosmological scales. However, this problem is caused by extremely small…
In any medium there are fluctuations due to temperature or due to the quantum nature of its constituents. If a material body is immersed into such a medium, its shape and the properties of its constituents modify the properties of 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 Casimir effect is one of the most direct manifestations of the existence of the vacuum quantum fluctuations, discovered by H. B Casimir in 1948. On the other hand, Lorentz invariance is one of the main and basic concepts in special…
The Casimir effect describes the attractive force arising due to quantum fluctuations of the vacuum electromagnetic field between closely spaced conducting plates. Traditionally, zeta-regularization is employed in calculations to address…
It is shown that quantum vacuum fluctuations give rise to a curvature of space-time of the order appropriate to explain the observed accelerated expansion of the universe. The fact that the fluctuations produce curvature, even if the…
We calculate the Casimir energy for scalar and gauge fields in interaction with zero-width mirrors, including quantum effects due to the matter fields inside the mirrors. We consider models where those fields are either scalar or fermionic,…
The Lifshitz formula is well known as a theoretical approach to investigate the Casimir effect at finite temperature. In this Letter, we generalize the Lifshitz formula to the Casimir effect originating from quantum fields at finite…
The Casimir effect is a physical manifestation of zero point energy of quantum vacuum. In a relativistic quantum field theory, Poincar\'e symmetry of the theory seems, at first sight, to imply that non-zero vacuum energy is inconsistent…
The accelerating expansion of the Universe points to a small positive vacuum energy density and negative vacuum pressure. A strong candidate is the cosmological constant in Einstein's equations of General Relativity. The vacuum dark energy…