Related papers: Spacetime Foam and the Cosmological Constant
A static non-singular 10-dimensional closed Friedmann universe of Planck size, filled with a perfect fluid with an equation of state with w = -2/3, can arise spontaneously by a quantum fluctuation from nothing in 11-dimensional spacetime. A…
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…
A simple model of spacetime foam, made by $N$ wormholes in a semiclassical approximation, is taken under examination. The Casimir-like energy of the quantum fluctuation of such a model and its probability of being realized are computed.…
We evaluate the quantum gravity partition function that counts the dimension of the Hilbert space of a simply connected spatial region of fixed proper volume in the context of Lovelock gravity, generalizing the results for Einstein gravity…
Quantum effects play an essential role in modern cosmology. Perhaps the most striking example comes from large-scale structures, generally assumed to originate from vacuum quantum fluctuations and stretched by an expansion phase. Inflation…
A theory of the cosmological constant Lambda is currently out of reach. Still, one can start from a set of axioms that describe the most desirable properties a cosmological constant should have. This can be seen in certain analogy to the…
The cosmological constant $(1/2)\lambda_{1}\phi_{, \mu}\phi ^{, \mu}/\phi ^{2}$ is introduced to the generalized scalar-tensor theory of gravitation with the coupling function $\omega (\phi)=\eta /(\xi -2)$ and the Machian cosmological…
It has been argued that the existence of a zero-point length is the hallmark of quantum gravity. In this letter we suggest a thermal mechanism whereby this quantum of length arises in flat, Euclidean spacetime $\mathbb{R}^d$. For this we…
As shown in previous work, there is a well-defined nonperturbative gravitational path integral including an explicit sum over topologies in the setting of Causal Dynamical Triangulations in two dimensions. In this paper we derive a complete…
We study the problem of the cosmological constant in the context of the multiverse in Lorentzian spacetime, and show that the cosmological constant will vanish in the future. This sort of argument was started from Coleman in 1989, and he…
Coupling any interacting quantum mechanical system to gravity in one (time) dimension requires the cosmological constant to belong to the matter energy spectrum and thus to be quantised, even though the gravity sector is free of any quantum…
The paper deals with the calculation of the gravitational entropy in the context of teleparallel gravity for de Sitter space-time. In such a theory it is possible to define gravitational energy and pressure, thus we use those expressions to…
Within the quantum mechanical treatment of the decay problem one finds that at late times $t$ the survival probability of an unstable state cannot have the form of an exponentially decreasing function of time $t$ but it has an inverse…
We study the decay of the cosmological constant in two spacetime dimensions through production of pairs. We show that the same nucleation process looks as quantum mechanical tunneling (instanton) to one Killing observer and as thermal…
The first and second laws of thermodynamics should lead to a consistent scenario for discussing the cosmological constant problem. In the present study, to establish such a thermodynamic scenario, cosmological equations in a flat…
We study the thermodynamic properties of high dimensional Schwarzschild de Sitter spacetimes with the consideration of quantum effects. It is shown that by considering the cosmological constant as a variable state parameter and adding an…
Gravity is a macroscopic manifestation of a microscopic quantum theory of space-time, just as the theories of elasticity and hydrodynamics are the macroscopic manifestation of the underlying quantum theory of atoms. The connection of…
Some theoretic results related to the cosmological constant, obtained in the 80's and 90's of last century, are reviewed. These results exhibit some interesting underlying pattern when viewed from a category-theoretic perspective. In doing…
The recent OPERA experiment of superluminal neutrinos has deep consequences in cosmology. In cosmology a fundamental constant is the cosmological constant. From observations one can estimate the effective cosmological constant…
A phenomenological model is proposed to explain the recent observed cosmological variation of the fine structure constant as an effect of the quantum vacuum, assuming a flat universe with cosmological constant $\Lambda$ in the cases…