Related papers: Weighing the Vacuum Energy
A consistency condition of general relativity as an effective field theory in Minkowskian background uniquely fixes the value of the cosmological constant. In two-loop calculations, including the interaction of gravitons with matter fields,…
We compute the vacuum energy of a scalar field rotating with angular velocity $\Omega$ on a disk of radius $R$ and with Dirichlet boundary conditions. The rotation is introduced by a metric obtained by a Galilean transformation from a rest…
The electromagnetic vacuum is known to have energy. It has been recently argued that the quantum vacuum can possess momentum, that adds up to the momentum of matter. This ``Casimir momentum'' is closely related to the Casimir effect, in…
We compare quantum hydrodynamics and quantum gravity. They share many common features. In particular, both have quadratic divergences, and both lead to the problem of the vacuum energy, which in the quantum gravity transforms to the…
The response of vacuum to the presence of external conditions is the subject of this work. We consider a generalization of the Casimir effect in the presence of curved boundaries on which a sharp potential is concentrated. The profile of…
This report offers a modern perspective on the problem of negative energy, based on a re-examination of the concept of time direction as it arises in a classical and quantum-mechanical context. From this analysis emerges an improved…
We discuss other contributions to the vacuum energy of quantum field theories and quantum gravity, which have not been considered in literature. As is well known, the presence of virtual particles in vacuum provides the so famous and…
An effective theory of gravity in the infrared is proposed, which involves the determinant of the metric relative to the determinant of a prior metric taken to be that of Minkowski spacetime. This effective theory can be interpreted as a…
We review the origins, motivations, and implications for cosmology and black holes, of our proposal that "dark energy" is not a quantum vacuum energy, but rather arises from a Weyl scaling invariant nonderivative component of the…
We discuss the motivation for high accuracy relativistic gravitational experiments in the Solar System and complementary cosmological tests. We focus our attention on the issue of distinguishing a generic scalar-theory of gravity as the…
This paper presents a theoretical calculation of the vacuum energy density by summing the contributions of all quantum fields vacuum states which turns out to indicate that there seems to be a missing bosonic contribution in order to match…
It is shown that weight operator of a composite quantum body in a weak external gravitational field in the post-Newtonian approximation of the General Relativity does not commute with its energy operator, taken in the absence of the field.…
We review recent theoretical results, obtained for the equivalence between gravitational mass and energy of a composite quantum body as well as for its breakdown at macroscopic and microscopic levels. In particular, we discuss that the…
The cosmological constant presents one of the most fascinating and confounding problems in physics. A straightforward, seemingly robust prediction of quantum mechanics and general relativity is that the vacuum energy gravitates. Therefore,…
In [5] we investigated the response of vacuum energy to a gravitational field by considering a Casimir apparatus in a weak gravitational field. Our approach was based on a conjecture involving the interpretation of spacetime as a refractive…
We present a simple "Wald-like" formula for gravitational energy about a constant curvature background spacetime. The formula is derived following the Abbott-Deser-Tekin approach for the definition of conserved asymptotic charges in…
We explicitly compute the dynamics of closed homogeneous and isotropic universes permeated by a single perfect fluid with a constant equation of state parameter $w$ in the context of a recent reformulation of general relativity, proposed in…
We review our recent theoretical results about inequivalence between passive and active gravitational masses and energy in semiclassical variant of general relativity, where gravitational field is not quantized but matter is quantized. To…
We calculate in a general background gauge, to one-loop order, the leading logarithmic contribution from the graviton self-energy at finite temperature $T$, extending a previous analysis done at $T=0$. The result, which has a transverse…
We propose a thermodynamical definition of the vacuum energy density $\rho_{\rm vac}$, defined as $\langle 0| T_{\mu\nu} |0\rangle = - \rho_{\rm vac} \, g_{\mu\nu}$, in quantum field theory in flat Minkowski space in $D$ spacetime…