Related papers: Vacuum Energy: "If Not Now, Then When?"
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…
In quantum theory the vacuum is defined as a state of minimum energy that is devoid of particles but still not completely empty. It is perhaps more surprising that its definition depends on the geometry of the system and on the trajectory…
The Einstein equation in a semi-classical approximation is applied to a spherical region of the universe, with the stress-energy tensor consisting of the mass density and pressure of the LambdaCDM cosmological model plus an additional…
There appears to be three, perhaps related, ways of approaching the nature of vacuum energy . The first is to say that it is just the lowest energy state of a given, usually quantum, system. The second is to equate vacuum energy with the…
In the $\Lambda$CDM model, dark energy is viewed as a constant vacuum energy density, the cosmological constant in the Einstein--Hilbert action. This assumption can be relaxed in various models that introduce a dynamical dark energy. In…
The inflationary prediction of a flat Universe is at odds with current determinations of the matter density (Omega_M~0.2-0.4). This dilemma can be resolved if a smooth component contributes the remaining energy density (Omega_X=1-Omega_M).…
Recent cosmological observations suggest the existence of a positive cosmological constant $\Lambda$ with the magnitude $\Lambda(G\hbar/c^3) \approx 10^{-123}$. This review discusses several aspects of the cosmological constant both from…
Recent cosmological observations suggest that nearly seventy per cent of the energy density in the universe is unclustered and has negative pressure. Several conceptual issues related to the modeling of this component (`dark energy'), which…
We suggest that the solution to the cosmological vacuum energy puzzle is linked to the infrared sector of the effective theory of gravity interacting with standard model fields, with QCD fields specifically. We work in the framework of low…
In this talk 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 collapsing universe (for a given…
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…
One of the major problems in cosmology today is to explain the observed acceleration of the universe. The present observational data are consistent with the simplest solution to this problem, which is based on the vacuum energy. A decaying…
The fundamental constants of electromagnetism, gravity and quantum mechanics can be related empirically by the numerical approximation $\ln(V_e/V_P)\approx \alpha^{-1}$, where $\alpha$ is the low energy value of the electromagnetic fine…
Dark energy and dark matter constitute 95% of the observable Universe. Yet the physical nature of these two phenomena remains a mystery. Einstein suggested a long-forgotten solution: gravitationally repulsive negative masses, which drive…
Considering the fundamental cutoff applied by the uncertainty relations' limit on virtual particles' frequency in the quantum vacuum, it is shown that the vacuum energy density is proportional to the inverse of the forth power of the…
In this paper we investigate possible solutions to the coincidence problem in flat phantom dark energy models with a constant dark energy equation of state and quintessence models with a linear scalar field potential. These models are…
A quark-gluon phase transition in the Universe is researched after which vacuum (dark) energy has hardened and become cosmological constant. Before this a vacuum component of the Universe was changing by jumps during phase transitions since…
In this paper, we give a possible solution to the cosmological constant problem. It is shown hat the traditional approach, based on volume weighting of probabilities, leads to an incoherent onclusion: the probability that a randomly chosen…
We determine the nature of the QCD transition using lattice calculations for physical quark masses. Susceptibilities are extrapolated to vanishing lattice spacing for three physical volumes, the smallest and largest of which differ by a…
In the presence of the gravitational field, the energy density of matter no longer coincides with its mass density. A discrepancy exists, of course, also between the associated power spectra. Within the $\Lambda$CDM model, we derive a…