Related papers: Surface Tension and the Cosmological Constant
The Planck scale is usually believed to be an unpassable wall. Putting a cutoff there and thinking of it as a quantized spacetime entity shows that. However, this is exactly the cause of many problems in quantum gravity. The cosmological…
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…
In this work we suggest a simple model of the cosmological constant as the coefficient of the quantum tunneling of vacuum fluctuations (with wave length larger than Planck length) at tiny, boundary spherical shell of the universe (with…
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 cosmological constant $\Lambda$ is a free parameter in Einstein's equations of gravity. We propose to fix its value with a boundary condition: test particles should be free when outside causal contact, e.g. at infinity. Under this…
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 purpose of this study is to describe a perfect fluid matter distribution that leads to a constant curvature region, thanks to the effect of a non-minimal coupling. This distribution exhibits a density profile within the range found in…
We propose a time-varying cosmological constant with a fixed equation of state, which evolves mainly through its interaction with the background during most of the long history of the universe. However, such interaction does not exist in…
Naive calculations in quantum field theory suggest that vacuum fluctuations should induce an enormous cosmological constant. What if these estimates are right? I argue that even a huge cosmological constant might be hidden in Planck scale…
We show how the scalar field, a candidate of quintessence, in a proposed model of the scalar-tensor theories of gravity provides a way to understand a small but nonzero cosmological constant as indicated by recent observations. A particular…
The cosmological constant problem is one of the greatest challenges in contemporary physics, since it is deeply rooted in the problematic interplay between quantum fields and gravity. The aim of this work is to review the key conceptual…
We extend General Relativity by promoting Planck scale and the cosmological constant into integration constants, interpreted as fluxes of $4$-forms hiding in the theory. When we include the charges of the $4$-forms, these `constants' can…
We address the problem of the cosmological constant within the Randall-Sundrum scenario with a brane stabilization mechanism. We consider brane tensions of general form. We examine the conditions under which a small change of the positive…
The observed value of the cosmological constant corresponds to a time scale that is very close to the current conformal age of the universe. Here we show that this is not a coincidence but is caused by a periodic boundary condition, which…
In this paper we present a statistical description of the cosmological constant in terms of massless bosons (gravitons). To this purpose, we use our recent results implying a non vanishing temperature ${T_{\Lambda}}$ for the cosmological…
According to general relativity, the present analysis shows on geometrical grounds that the cosmological constant problem is an artifact due to the unfounded link of this fundamental constant to vacuum energy density of quantum…
The value of the cosmological constant arising from a crystalline model for vacuum cosmic space with lattice parameter of the order of the neutron radius [1] has been calculated. The model allows to solve, in an easy way, the problem of the…
With attempts to quench the cosmological constant $\Lambda$ having so far failed, we instead investigate what could be done if $\Lambda$ is not quenched and actually gets to be as big as elementary particle physics suggests. Since the…
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 address the question whether a medium featuring $p + \rho = 0$, dubbed $\Lambda$- medium, has to be necessarily a cosmological constant. By using effective field theory, we show that this is not the case for a class of media comprising…