Related papers: Comments on the Quantum Vacuum and the Light Accel…
In the late 1990s, observations of type Ia supernovae led to the astounding discovery that the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate. The explanation of this anomalous acceleration has been one of the great problems in physics since…
The absence of guidance from fundamental physics about the mechanism behind cosmic acceleration has given rise to a number of alternative cosmological scenarios. These are based either on modifications of general relativistic gravitation…
A localized charged particle oscillating near a reflecting boundary is considered as a model for non-cancellation of vacuum fluctuations. Although the mean velocity of the particle is sinusoidal, the velocity variance produced by vacuum…
Optical quasar spectra can be used to trace variations of the fine-structure constant alpha. Controversial results that have been published in last years suggest that in addition to to wavelength calibration problems systematic errors might…
We argue that the so-called "Pioneer Anomaly" is related to the quantum vacuum fluctuations. Our approach is based on the hypothesis of the gravitational repulsion between matter and antimatter, what allows considering, the virtual…
An anomalous constant acceleration of (8.7 \pm 1.3) x 10^-8 cm/s^2 directed toward the Sun has been discovered by Anderson et al. in the motion of the Pioneer 10/11 and Galileo spacecrafts. In parallel, the WMAP results have definitively…
In this essay, I present an alternative explanation for the cosmic acceleration which appears as a consequence of recent high redshift Supernova data. In the usual interpretation, this cosmic acceleration is explained by the presence of a…
The quantum mechanical evolution of an accelerated extended detector coupled to a massless scalar field is exhibited and the back-reaction due to emission or absorption processes computed at first order in the change of the detector's mass…
Cosmological models with two interacting fluids, each satisfying the strong energy condition, are studied in the framework of classical General Relativity. If the interactions are phenomenologically described by a power law in the scale…
Detection of high-redshift absorption in the optical spectra of quasars have provided a powerful tool to measure spatial and temporal variations of physical ``constants'' in the Universe. It is demonstrated that high sensitivity to the…
Current astronomical observations are successfully explained by the present cosmological paradigm based on the concordance model ($\Lambda_0$CDM + Inflation). However, such a scenario is composed of a heterogeneous mix of ingredients for…
We investigate the dynamics of the FLRW flat cosmological models in which the vacuum energy varies with redshift. A particularly well motivated model of this type is the so-called quantum field vacuum, in which both kind of terms $H^{2}$…
Any theory invoked to explain cosmic acceleration predicts consistency relations between the expansion history, structure growth, and all related observables. Currently there exist high-quality measurements of the expansion history from…
Till now, the foundation of quantum physics is still mysterious. To explore the mysteries in the foundation of quantum physics, people always take it for granted that quantum processes must be some types of fields/objects on a rigid space.…
Most of the successful physical theories rely on the constancy of few fundamental quantities (such as the speed of light, $c$, the fine-structure constant, \alpha, the proton to electron mass ratio, \mu, etc), and constraining the possible…
At very early times, the universe was not in a vacuum state. Under the assumtion that the deviation from equillibrium was large, in particular that it is higher than the scale of inflation, we analyse the conditions for local transitions…
We explore the idea that cosmic acceleration may be a byproduct of late-time effects like structure formation in two steps. First, we consider the equation of state for an inhomogeneous cosmic fluid, which may lead to a Gedanken-model for…
In braneworld models a variable vacuum energy may appear if the size of the extra dimension changes during the evolution of the universe. In this scenario the acceleration of the universe is related not only to the variation of the…
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…
All experimental evidence {indicates} that the vacuum is not void, but filled with something truly quantum. This is reflected by terms such as {zero-point} fluctuations, and Dirac's sea of virtual particle-antiparticle pairs, and last but…