Related papers: Counter example to a quantum inequality
The idea that the cosmological term, Lambda, should be a time dependent quantity in cosmology is a most natural one. It is difficult to conceive an expanding universe with a strictly constant vacuum energy density, namely one that has…
Why are "analogue spacetimes'' interesting? For the purposes of this workshop the answer is simple: Analogue spacetimes provide one with physically well-defined and physically well-understood concrete models of many of the phenomena that…
Quantum field theory allows for the suppression of vacuum fluctuations, leading to sub-vacuum phenomena. One of these is the appearance of local negative energy density. Selected aspects of negative energy will be reviewed, including the…
Via the AdS/CFT correspondence, fundamental constraints on the entanglement structure of quantum systems translate to constraints on spacetime geometries that must be satisfied in any consistent theory of quantum gravity. In this paper, we…
In quantum field theory there exist states for which the energy density is negative. It is important that these negative energy densities satisfy constraints, such as quantum inequalities, to minimize possible violations of causality, the…
The problem of an enormously large energy density of the quantum vacuum is discussed in connection with the concept of renormalization of physical parameters in quantum field theory. Using the method of dimensional regularization, it is…
Spacetimes admitting appropriate spatial homothetic Killing vectors are called spatially homothetic spacetimes. Such spacetimes conform to the fact that gravity has no length-scale for matter inhomogeneities. The matter density for such…
The classical Penrose inequality, a relation between the ADM mass and the area of any cross section of the black hole event horizon, was introduced as a test of the weak cosmic censorship conjecture: if it fails, the trapped surface is not…
Spherically symmetric space-times provide many examples for interesting black hole solutions, which classically are all singular. Following a general program, space-like singularities in spherically symmetric quantum geometry, as well as…
In quantum gravity there is no notion of absolute time. Like all other quantities in the theory, the notion of time has to be introduced "relationally", by studying the behavior of some physical quantities in terms of others chosen as a…
The contemporary physics has revealed growing evidences that the emergence can be applied to not only biology and condensed matter systems but also gravity and spacetime. We observe that noncommutative spacetime necessarily implies emergent…
When the difference between changes in energy and entropy at a given temperature is correlated with the ratio between the same changes in energy and entropy at zero average free energy of an ensemble of similar but distinct molecule-sized…
Numerous approaches to a quantum theory of gravity posit fundamental ontologies that exclude spacetime, either partially or wholly. This situation raises deep questions about how such theories could relate to the empirical realm, since…
Negative energy density is unavoidable in the quantum theory of field. We give a revised proof of the existence of negative energy density unambiguously for a massless scalar field.
Quantum inequality restrictions on the stress-energy tensor for negative energy are developed for three and four-dimensional static spacetimes. We derive a general inequality in terms of a sum of mode functions which constrains the…
The regularized vacuum energy (or energy density) of a quantum field subjected to static external conditions is shown to satisfy a certain partial differential equation with respect to two variables, the mass and the "time" (ultraviolet…
A diverse set of observations now compellingly suggest that Universe possesses a nonzero cosmological constant. In the context of quantum-field theory a cosmological constant corresponds to the energy density of the vacuum, and the wanted…
Quantum information can provide a lens for characterizing the operational implications of spacetime physics. A well-known result in this area is that quantum entanglement is degraded in the vicinity of a black hole. This result treats the…
The search for a theory of quantum gravity is the most fundamental problem in all of theoretical physics, but there are as yet no experimental results at all to guide this endeavor. What seems to be needed is a pragmatic way to test if…
The quantum field theoretic prediction for the vacuum energy density leads to a value for the effective cosmological constant that is incorrect by between 60 to 120 orders of magnitude. We review an old proposal of replacing Einstein's…