Related papers: Islands in the Lambda-sea: An alternative cosmolog…
The energy density of the universe today may be dominated by the vacuum energy of a slowly rolling scalar field. Making a quantum expansion around such a time dependent solution is found to break fundamental symmetries of quantum field…
A spacetime consisting of parallel electric/magnetic fields held together by its own gravity in the presence of a cosmological constant $\Lambda$ is derived as a limit of the de Sitter/anti-de Sitter C-metric. The limiting procedure is…
Determining the initial state of the universe is a challenging problem in quantum cosmology and we argue that the issue is intractable if the basic postulates of quantum mechanics are not modified in a nontrivial way. Namely a "standard"…
We present a novel theory of the very early universe which addresses the traditional horizon and flatness problems of big bang cosmology and predicts a scale invariant spectrum of perturbations. Unlike inflation, this scenario requires no…
We discuss cosmological models for an eternal universe. Physical observables show no singularity from the infinite past to the infinite future. While the universe is evolving, there is no beginning and no end - the universe exists forever.…
The present paper seeks to construct a quantum theory of the cosmological constant in which its presently observed very small value emerges naturally.
We describe the dynamics of a cosmological term in the spherically symmetric case by an r-dependent second rank symmetric tensor \Lambda_{\mu\nu} invariant under boosts in the radial direction. The cosmological tensor \Lambda_{\mu\nu}…
A mechanism for suppressing the cosmological constant is developed, based on an analogy with a superconducting phaseshift in which free fermions coupled perturbatively to a weak gravitational field are in an unstable false vacuum state. The…
We make the cosmological constant, {\Lambda}, into a field and restrict the variations of the action with respect to it by causality. This creates an additional Einstein constraint equation. It restricts the solutions of the standard…
The cosmological constant problem is examined under the assumption that the extrinsic curvature of the space-time contributes to the vacuum. A compensation mechanism based on a variable cosmological term is proposed. Under a suitable…
As discussed in a number of recent papers, cosmological stasis is a phenomenon wherein the abundances of multiple cosmological energy components with different equations of state remain constant for an extended period despite the expansion…
We argue that the total observable entropy is bounded by the inverse of the cosmological constant. This holds for all space-times with a positive cosmological constant, including cosmologies dominated by ordinary matter, and recollapsing…
We extend the usual gravitational action principle by promoting the bare cosmological constant (CC) from a parameter to a field which can take many possible values. Variation leads to a new integral constraint equation which determines the…
A semi-classical analysis of vacuum energy in the expanding spacetime suggests that the cosmological term decays with time, with a concomitant matter production. For early times we find, in Planck units, $\Lambda \approx H^4$, where H is…
I review two cosmological paradigms which are alternative to the current inflationary scenario. The first alternative is the "matter bounce", a non-singular bouncing cosmology with a matter-dominated phase of contraction. The second is an…
We describe several different regimes which are possible in inflationary cosmology. The simplest one is inflation without self-reproduction of the universe. In this scenario the universe is not stationary. The second regime, which exists in…
A new model of oscillators was suggested, in which an oscillating particle in the minimum energy state has a nonzero velocity. A system consisting of a point material particle and a scalar field described by the nonlinear Klein-Gordon…
Many natural, technological and social systems are inherently not in equilibrium. We show, by detailed analysis of exemplar models, the emergence of equilibrium-like behavior in localized or nonlocalized domains within non-equilibrium…
We study the phenomenon of mass loss by a scalar charge -- a point particle that acts a source for a noninteracting scalar field -- in an expanding universe. The charge is placed on comoving world lines of two cosmological spacetimes: a de…
We show that in imaginary time quantum metric fluctuations of empty space form a self-consistent de Sitter gravitational instanton that can be thought of as describing tunneling from "nothing" into de Sitter space of real time (no…