Related papers: Physical mechanisms underpinning the vacuum permit…
The vacuum fluctuations of all quantum fields filling the universe are supposed to leave enormous energy and pressure contributions which are incompatible with observations. It has been recently suggested that, when the effective nature of…
We discuss the main myths related to the vacuum energy and cosmological constant, such as: ``unbearable lightness of space-time''; the dominating contribution of zero point energy of quantum fields to the vacuum energy; non-zero vacuum…
We consider three fundamental issues in quantum gravity: (a) the black hole information paradox (b) the unboundedness of entropy that can be stored inside a black hole horizon (c) the relation between the black hole horizon and the…
Quantum fields possess zero-point or vacuum fluctuations which induce mechanical effects, namely generalised Casimir forces, on any scatterer. Symmetries of vacuum therefore raise fundamental questions when confronted with the principle of…
Vacuum can be defined with exact mathematical precision as the state which remains when a fermion, with all its special characteristics, is created out of absolutely nothing. The definition leads to a special form of relativistic quantum…
We show that the interpretation of $\mathbf{D}=\varepsilon_{0} \mathbf{E}$ as vacuum polarization is consistent with quantum electrodynamics. A free electromagnetic field polarizes the vacuum but the magnetization and polarization currents…
The gargantuan discrepancy between the value of the observed cosmological constant and that expected from the zero-point energy of known matter fields can be eliminated by supposing that on macroscopic scales the overwhelming majority of…
The principles of General Relativity allow for a non-vanishing cosmological constant, which can possibly be interpreted at least partially in terms of quantum-fluctuations of matter fields. Depending on sign and magnitude it can cause…
The highly non-trivial structure of the $\theta$--vacuum encodes many of the fundamental properties of gauge theories. In particular, the response of the vacuum to the $\theta$--term perturbation is sensitive to the existence of…
We consider the effect of the magnetic field background in the form of a tube of the finite transverse size on the vacuum of the quantized charged massive scalar field which is subject to the Dirichlet boundary condition at the edge of the…
The downward acceleration of the virtual electrically charged fermion particles of the quantum vacuum is responsible for the Einstein Weak Equivalence Principle and for our perception of 4D space-time curvature near the earth. Since the…
We examine whether fluctuation-induced forces can lead to stable levitation. First, we analyze a collection of classical objects at finite temperature that contain fixed and mobile charges, and show that any arrangement in space is unstable…
We admit that the vacuum is not empty but is filled with continuously appearing and disappearing virtual fermion pairs. We show that if we simply model the propagation of the photon in vacuum as a series of transient captures within the…
We develop a non-conventional description of the vacuum energy in quantum field theory in terms of quantum entropy. Precisely, we show that the vacuum energy of any non-interacting quantum field at zero temperature is proportional to the…
In this letter we address some of the issues raised in the literature about the conflict between a large vacuum energy density, apriori predicted by quantum field theory, and the observed dark energy which must be the energy of vacuum or…
Physical vacuum is a special superfluid medium populated by enormous amount of virtual particle-antiparticle pairs. Its motion is described by the modified Navier-Stokes equation: (a)~the pressure gradient divided by the mass density is…
A possible connection between the electromagnetic quantum vacuum and inertia was first published by Haisch, Rueda and Puthoff (1994). If correct, this would imply that mass may be an electromagnetic phenomenon and thus in principle subject…
The outcome of a single quantum experiment is unpredictable, except in a pure-state limit. The definite process that takes place in the apparatus may either be intrinsically random or be explainable from a deeper theory. While the first…
The {\em instability of vacuum energy} in de Sitter space as discussed recently by Polyakov is argued to be a generic feature when external gravitational fields are present. It is related to the existence of {\em forbidden} (by momentum…
We want to study the influence of the quantum vacuum on the light propagation. At first, by working in the standard linear quantum theory of the electromagnetic fields, it is shown that the electric permittivity and the magnetic…