Related papers: Dark Energy: is it `just' Einstein's Cosmological …
The discovery ten years ago that the expansion of the Universe is accelerating put in place the present cosmological model, in which the Universe is composed of 4% baryons, 20% dark matter, and 76% dark energy. Yet the underlying cause of…
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…
I try to revive, and possibly reconcile, a debate started a few years ago, about the relative roles of a bare cosmological constant and of a vacuum energy, by taking the attitude to try to get the most from the physics now available as…
The cosmological constant $\Lambda$ is usually interpreted as Dark Energy (DE) or modified gravity (MG). Here we propose instead that $\Lambda$ corresponds to a boundary term in the action of classical General Relativity. The action is zero…
Everpresent $\Lambda$ is a cosmological scenario in which the observed cosmological "constant" $\Lambda$ fluctuates between positive and negative values with a vanishing mean, and with a magnitude comparable to the critical density at any…
It is commonly recognized now that Dark Energy (Lambda-term) is of crucial importance both at the early (inflationary) stage of cosmological evolution and at the present time. However, little is known about its nature and origin till now.…
The cosmological constant, i.e., the energy density stored in the true vacuum state of all existing fields in the Universe, is the simplest and the most natural possibility to describe the current cosmic acceleration. However, despite its…
Cosmology is entering a very exciting time in its history, when a wealth of cutting-edge experiments are all starting to collect data, or about to. These experiments aim at addressing some of the most intriguing questions in fundamental…
We have shown that the varying physical constant model is consistent with the recently published variational approach wherein Einstein equations are modified to include the variation of the speed of light c, gravitational constant G and…
A new kind of accelerating flat model with no dark energy that is fully dominated by cold dark matter (CDM) is investigated. The number of CDM particles is not conserved and the present accelerating stage is a consequence of the negative…
Within the frame of the $\Lambda$ cold dark matter paradigm, a dark energy component of unknown origin is expected to represent nearly 70% of the energy of the Universe. Herein, a non-standard form of the Hubble law is advocated, with the…
In this article we describe a model of the universe consisting of a mixture of the ordinary matter and a so-called cosmic quaternionic field. The basic idea here consists in an attempt to interpret $\Lambda$ as the energy density of the…
The discovery ten years ago that the expansion of the Universe is accelerating put in place the last major building block of the present cosmological model, in which the Universe is composed of 4% baryons, 20% dark matter, and 76% dark…
A six parameter cosmological model, involving a vacuum energy density that is extremely tiny compared to fundamental particle physics scales, describes a large body of increasingly accurate astronomical data. In a first part of this brief…
In 1917 Einstein published his Cosmological Considerations Concerning the General Theory of Relativity. In it was the first use of the cosmological constant. Shortly thereafter Schr\"odinger presented a note providing a solution to these…
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 at least as large as the Fermi scale. The…
The general thermodynamic analysis of the quantum vacuum, which is based on our knowledge of the vacua in condensed-matter systems, is consistent with the Einstein earlier view on the cosmological constant. In the equilibrium Universes the…
According to recent observations, the Dark Energy would represent 70% of the content of our Universe. The most popular way to account for this Dark Energy make use of the Cosmological Constant introduced by Einstein. However, some…
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…
The presence of dark energy in the Universe is inferred directly and indirectly from a large body of observational evidence. The simplest and most theoretically appealing possibility is the vacuum energy density (cosmological constant).…