Related papers: A Strong Constraint on Ever-Present Lambda
Although big bang cosmology effectively models even the most puzzling observational data, it offers no insight into why the cosmological expansion should occur at all. In this paper it is suggested that a finite Universe poses particular…
In a recent paper (Vigoureux et al. Int. J. Theor. Phys. 47:928, 2007) it has been suggested that the velocity of light and the expansion of the universe are two aspects of one single concept connecting space and time in the expanding…
We discuss the cosmological evolution of matter sources with small anisotropic pressures. This includes electric and magnetic fields, collisionless relativistic particles, gravitons, antisymmetric axion fields in low-energy string…
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 traditional "explanation" for the observed acceleration of the universe is the existence of a positive cosmological constant. However, this can hardly be a truly convincing explanation, as an expanding universe is not expected to have a…
Despite the ultraviolet problems with canonical quantum gravity, as an effective field theory its infrared phenomena should enjoy fully quantum mechanical unitary time evolution. Currently this is not possible, the impediment being what is…
After reviewing the cosmological constant problem - why is Lambda not huge? - I outline the two basic approaches that had emerged by the late 1980s, and note that each made a clear prediction. Precision cosmological experiments now indicate…
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…
We investigate to what extent future microwave background experiments might be able to detect a suppression of fluctuation power on large scales in flat and open universe models. Such suppression would arise if fluctuations are generated by…
We study the cosmological evolution of isotropic matter on an infinitely thin conical codimension-two brane-world. Our analysis is based on the boundary dynamics of a six-dimensional model in the presence of an induced gravity term on the…
A mechanism for suppressing the cosmological constant is described, using a superconducting analogy in which fermions coupled to gravitons are in an unstable false vauum. The coupling of the fermions to gravitons and a screened attractive…
In `entropic cosmology', instead of a cosmological constant $\Lambda$, an extra driving term is added to the Friedmann equation and the acceleration equation, taking into account the entropy and the temperature on the horizon of the…
We show that the entropy of cosmological perturbations originating as quantum vacuum fluctuations in the very early universe, including the contribution of the leading nonlinear interactions, can be viewed as momentum space entanglement…
If we want to explain the recently discovered accelerated stage of the universe, one of the option we have is to modify the Einstein tensor. The simplest such modification, in agreement with all observations, is the positive cosmological…
A simple model of uniformly expanding, homogeneous Universe with a bulk viscosity is studied wherein the inflationary density decays due to viscous dissipation during the expansion phase of the Universe. The model is shown to generate the…
In an undulant universe, cosmic expansion is characterized by alternating periods of acceleration and deceleration. We examine cosmologies in which the dark-energy equation of state varies periodically with the number of e-foldings of the…
The universe with adiabatic matter creation is considered. It is thought that the negative pressure caused by matter creation can play the role of a dark energy component, and drive the accelerating expansion of the universe. Using the Type…
We study the cosmic density perturbations induced from fluctuation of the amplitude of late-decaying scalar condensations (called \phi) in the scenario where the scalar field \phi once dominates the universe. In such a scenario, the cosmic…
We show that the Supernovae results, implying evidence for an accelerating Universe, may be closely related to the recent discovery of redshift dependence in the fine structure constant $\alpha$. The link is a class of varying speed of…
The anthropic explanation for the peculiarly small observed value of the cosmological constant $\Lambda_{\rm obs}$ argues that this value promotes the formation of stars, planets, and ultimately of observers such as ourselves. I show that a…