Related papers: Curved Space or Curved Vacuum?
We argue that standard tools of holography can be used to describe fully non-perturbative microscopic models of cosmology in which a period of accelerated expansion may result from the positive potential energy of time-dependent scalar…
Rapid progress has been made recently toward the measurement of cosmological parameters. Still, there are areas remaining where future progress will be relatively slow and difficult, and where further attention is needed. In this review,…
We are at a specific period of modern cosmology, during which the large increase of the amount of data leads to the idea that the determination of cosmological parameters has been achieved with a rather good precision. There is a large…
Cylindrical-like coordinates for constant-curvature 3-spaces are introduced and discussed. This helps to clarify the geometrical properties, the coordinate ranges and the meaning of free parameters in the static vacuum solution of Linet and…
Reasonable parametrizations of the current Hubble data set of the expansion rate of our homogeneous and isotropic universe, after suitable smoothing of these data, strongly suggests that the area of the apparent horizon increases…
Increasing improvements in the independent determinations of the Hubble constant and the age of the universe now seem to indicate that we need a small non-vanishing cosmological constant to make the two independent observations consistent…
Inflation creates large-scale cosmological density perturbations that are characterized by an isotropic, homogeneous, and Gaussian random distribution about a locally flat background. Even in a flat universe, the spatial curvature measured…
We demonstrate how one can distinguish a curved 4-dimensional spacetime from a flat one, when it is possible, relying only on the causality relations between events. It is known that it is possible only for spacetimes that are not…
In this paper we consider the effects of adding curvature in extended cosmologies involving a free-to-vary neutrino sector and different parametrizations of Dark Energy (DE). We make use of the Planck 2018 cosmic microwave background…
The energy density of the vacuum, Lambda, is at least 60 orders of magnitude smaller than several known contributions to it. Approaches to this problem are tightly constrained by data ranging from elementary observations to precision…
Based on a more careful canonical analysis, we motivate a reduced quantization - in the sense of superspace quantization - of slightly inhomogeneous cosmology in place of the Dirac quantization in the existing literature, and provide it in…
In an expanding universe the vacuum energy density \rho_{\Lambda} is expected to be a dynamical quantity. In quantum field theory in curved space-time \rho_{\Lambda} should exhibit a slow evolution, determined by the expansion rate of the…
Recent data on supernovae favor high values of the cosmological constant. Spacetimes with a cosmological constant have non-relativistic kinematics quite different from Galilean kinematics. De Sitter spacetimes, vacuum solutions of…
The continuum of real numbers has served well as a model for physical space in mechanics and field theories. However it is a well-motivated and popular idea that at the fundamental Planck scale the combination of gravitational and quantum…
Averaging in general relativity is a complicated operation, due to the general covariance of the theory and the non-linearity of Einstein's equations. The latter of these ensures that smoothing spacetime over cosmological scales does not…
Varying the curvature, quantum phase transitions are investigated in holographic confining QFTs defined on a fixed constant positive curvature background. We find a competition between two branches of solutions and a phase transition as one…
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…
Theories of the cosmological constant fall into two classes, those in which the vacuum energy is fixed by the fundamental theory and those in which it is adjustable in some way. For each class we discuss key challenges. The string theory…
The standard concordance model of the Universe is based on the cosmological constant as the driver of accelerating expansion. This concordance model is being subjected to a growing range of inter-locking observations. In addition to using…
There are hints, both from cosmology and from neutrino oscillation experiments, that one or two sterile neutrinos with eV masses are favored. We consider the implications of combining data from short baseline neutrino experiments with…