Related papers: Casimir Effect confronts Cosmological Constant
In this colloquium-level account, I describe the cosmological constant problem: why is the energy of empty space at least 60 orders of magnitude smaller than several known contributions to it from the Standard Model of particle physics? I…
From an observational perspective cosmology is today in excellent shape - advances in instrumentation and data processing have enabled us to study the universe in detail back to when the first galaxies formed, map the fluctuations in the…
We analyze the high temperature (or classical) limit of the Casimir effect. A useful quantity which arises naturally in our discussion is the ``relative Casimir energy", which we define for a configuration of disjoint conducting boundaries…
The mystery of the cosmological constant is probably the most pressing obstacle to significantly improving the models of elementary particle physics derived from string theory. The problem arises because in the standard framework of low…
The discovery that the cosmic expansion is accelerating has been followed by an intense theoretical and experimental response in physics and astronomy. The discovery implies that our most basic notions about how gravity work are violated on…
Recent astronomical observations of distant supernovae light-curves suggest that the expansion of the universe has recently begun to accelerate. Acceleration is created by an anti-gravitational repulsive stress, like that produced by a…
An expanding universe is not expected to have a static vacuum energy density. The so-called cosmological constant $\Lambda$ should be an approximation, certainly a good one for a fraction of a Hubble time, but it is most likely a temporary…
Quantum vacuum energy has been known to have observable consequences since 1948 when Casimir calculated the force of attraction between parallel uncharged plates, a phenomenon confirmed experimentally with ever increasing precision. Casimir…
In this paper the quantum vacuum energies induced by massive fluctuations of one real scalar field on a configuration of two partially transparent plates are analysed. The physical properties of the infinitely thin plates are characterized…
We deal with a dynamical mechanism in which a large cosmological constant, as suggested by inflationary scenarios, decays due to expansion of the universe. This mechanism has its origin in the gravitational coupling of the vacuum density.…
We show that a tiny but non-zero positive cosmological constant, which has been strongly suggested by the recent astronomical observations on supernovae and CMBR, may change notably the behaviors of the ultrahigh energy cosmic ray…
The observed value of the cosmological constant poses large theoretical problems. We find that topology of the Universe provides a natural source for it. Restricting dynamically an Einstein-Cartan gravity to General Relativity in our…
The quantum gravitational contribution to the renormalization group behavior of the electric charge in Einstein-Maxwell theory with a cosmological constant is considered. Quantum gravity is shown to lead to a contribution to the running…
The Casimir force between metallic plates made of realistic materials is evaluated for distances in the nanometer range. A spectrum over real frequencies is introduced and shows narrow peaks due to surface resonances (plasmon polaritons or…
In this work, it is shown that a non-zero vacuum energy density (the Casimir energy) for a scalar field appears in a continuous elastic solid due to the presence of a topological defect, the screw dislocation. An exact expression is…
With cooling of the cosmological plasma during phase transitions in the early Universe vacuum condensates of quantum fields were produced with negative energy density. Probably these condensates have compensated the initial vacuum energy.…
Quantum liquids, in which an effective Lorentzian metric and thus some kind of gravity gradually arise in the low-energy corner, are the objects where the problems related to the quantum vacuum can be investigated in detail. In particular,…
We develop a cosmological theory in which the evolution of the universe is controlled by the cosmological constant and dominated by the associated vacuum energy. The universe starts as a classical de Sitter space with an infinite effective…
The Casimir energy is evaluated for massless scalar fields under Dirichlet or Neumann boundary conditions, and for the electromagnetic field with perfect conductor boundary conditions on one and two infinite parallel plates moving by…
The Wightman function and the vacuum expectation values of the field squared and of the energy-momentum tensor are obtained, for a massive scalar field with an arbitrary curvature coupling parameter, in the region between two infinite…