Related papers: Quintessence, the Gravitational Constant, and Grav…
The energy density of the vacuum, Lambda, is at least 60 orders of magnitude smaller than several known contributions to it. Approaches to this problem are tightly constrained by data ranging from elementary observations to precision…
An alternative to a cosmological constant is quintessence, defined as a slowly-varying scalar field potential V(\phi). If quintessence is observationally significant, an epoch of inflation is beginning at the present epoch, with \phi the…
A simple description of the vacuum energy (cosmological constant) problem for non-experts is presented. Basic features of cosmology with non-zero vacuum energy are discussed. The astronomical data which indicate that the universe is filled…
The issues of quintessence and cosmic acceleration can be discussed in the framework of higher order theories of gravity. We can define effective pressure and energy density directly connected to the Ricci scalar of curvature of a generic…
It has recently been conjectured that string theory does not admit de Sitter vacua, and that quintessence explains the current epoch of accelerated cosmic expansion. A proposed, key prediction of this scenario is time-varying couplings in…
We study the possibility that the vacuum energy density of scalar and internal-space gauge fields arising from the process of dimensional reduction of higher dimensional gravity theories plays the role of quintessence. We show that, for the…
The high-quality cosmological data, which became available in the last decade, have thrusted upon us a rather preposterous composition for the universe which poses one of the greatest challenges theoretical physics has ever faced: the…
After a short history of the $\Lambda$-term it is explained why the (effective) cosmological constant is expected to obtain contributions from short-distance physics, corresponding to an energy at least as large as the Fermi scale. The…
Observations suggest that nearly seventy per cent of the energy density in the universe is unclustered and exerts negative pressure. Theoretical understanding of this component (`dark energy'), which is driving an accelerated expansion of…
In this work we present a model of the universe in which dark energy is modelled explicitely with both a dynamical quintessence field and a cosmological constant. Our results confirm the possibility of a future collapsing universe (for a…
The recent observations of type Ia supernovae strongly support that the universe is accelerating now and decelerated in the recent past. By assuming a general relation between the quintessence potential and the quintessence kinetic energy,…
We introduce a dynamical model to reduce a large cosmological constant to a sufficiently small value. The basic ingredient in this model is a distinction which has been made between the two unit systems used in cosmology and particle…
This is an essay sketching the line of thinking which has led the present author to propose the constituent or atomic model of gravitation more than a decade ago. It turns out that viewing the problem of gravitation as a quantum many body…
We address the fine-tuning problem of dark energy cosmologies which arises when the dark energy density needs to initially lie in a narrow range in order for its present value to be consistent with observations. As recently noticed, this…
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…
We review the gauged quintessence scenario, wherein the quintessence scalar field responsible for dark energy is promoted to a complex field charged under a dark $U(1)$ gauge symmetry. This construction leads to new and potentially rich…
A substantial fraction of the energy density of the universe may consist of quintessence in the form of a slowly-rolling scalar field. Since the energy density of the scalar field generally decreases more slowly than the matter energy…
The notion of ``fundamental constant'' is heavily theory-laden. A natural, fairly precise formulation is possible in the context of the standard model (here defined to include gravity). Some fundamental constants have profound geometric…
A modified-gravity theory is considered with a four-form field strength F, a variable gravitational coupling parameter G(F), and a standard matter action. This theory provides a concrete realization of the general vacuum variable q as the…
In this essay we offer a comprehensible overview of the gravitational aether scenario. This is a possible extension of Einstein's theory of relativity to the quantum regime via an effective approach. Quantization of gravity usually faces…