Related papers: Resolving the Cosmological Missing Energy Problem
In this article the cosmological constant problems, as well as the astronomical evidence for a cosmologically significant homogeneous exotic energy density with negative pressure (quintessence), are reviewed for a broad audience of…
I briefly review the cosmological constant problem and the issue of dark energy (or quintessence). Within the framework of quantum field theory, the vacuum expectation value of the energy momentum tensor formally diverges as $k^4$. A cutoff…
The old cosmological constant problem is to understand why the vacuum energy is so small; the new problem is to understand why it is comparable to the present mass density. Several approaches to these problems are reviewed. Quintessence…
The cosmic microwave background anisotropy is sensitive to the slope and amplitude of primordial energy density and gravitational wave fluctuations, the baryon density, the Hubble constant, the cosmological constant, the ionization history,…
Quintessence -- the energy density of a slowly evolving scalar field -- may constitute a dynamical form of the homogeneous dark energy in the universe. We review the basic idea in the light of the cosmological constant problem. Cosmological…
The cosmological constant, i.e., the energy density stored in the true vacuum state of all existing fields in the Universe, is the simplest and the most natural possibility to describe the current cosmic acceleration. However, despite its…
There is some evidence that the Universe is presently undergoing accelerating expansion. This has restored some credit to the scenarios with a non-vanishing cosmological constant. From the point of view of a theory of fundamental…
Dynamical vacuum energy or quintessence, a slowly varying and spatially inhomogeneous component of the energy density with negative pressure, is currently consistent with the observational data. One potential difficulty with the idea of…
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…
I consider some of the issues we face in trying to understand dark energy. Huge fluctuations in the unknown dark energy equation of state can be hidden in distance data, so I argue that model-independent tests which signal if the…
Two sides of cosmological constant problem are discussed: a mysterious compensation of all contributions to vacuum energy with the accuracy of 100-50 orders of magnitude and a surprising equality of a constant vacuum energy density to the…
New, large, ground and space telescopes are contributing to an exciting and rapid period of growth in observational cosmology. The subject is now far from its earlier days of being data-starved and unconstrained, and new data are fueling a…
Physics invites the idea that space contains energy whose gravitational effect approximates that of Einstein's cosmological constant, Lambda; nowadays the concept is termed dark energy or quintessence. Physics also suggests the dark energy…
Recent observations suggest that a large fraction of the energy density of the universe has negative pressure. One explanation is vacuum energy density; another is quintessence in the form of a scalar field slowly evolving down a potential.…
We consider two problems that have vexed physicists for several decades -- dark matter and the cosmological constant. The problem has been that the former has not been detected while the latter gives a far higher value than detected by…
The cosmological constant problem is explained by a theory based on the discrete space-time hypothesis. The calculated cosmological constant value is of the order of 10^-52[m]^-2 or equivalent to about 0.7 of the critical mass density. It…
Although quintessence cosmologies seem to explain the amount of cosmological constant today, the required conditions are severe. For example, an extremely slowly varying and light scalar field that rolls toward the vanishing vacuum energy…
The presence of dark energy in the Universe is inferred directly from the accelerated expansion of the Universe, and indirectly, from measurements of cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropy. Dark energy contributes about 2/3 of the…
Some issues of the cosmological constant or dark energy are briefly reviewed. There are an increasing number of observations that constrain the equation of state of dark energy more stringently and favor the time-independent cosmological…
Observational constraints guide one forcefully to examine models in which the matter density is substantially less than critical density. Particularly noteworthy are those which are consistent with inflation. For these models, microwave…