Related papers: Quintessential Vanishing of the Cosmological Const…
We show how the scalar field, a candidate of quintessence, in a proposed model of the scalar-tensor theories of gravity provides a way to understand a small but nonzero cosmological constant as indicated by recent observations. A particular…
We discuss some of the issues which we encounter when we try to invoke the scalar-tensor theories of gravitation as a theoretical basis of quintessence. One of the advantages of appealing to these theories is that they allow us to implement…
We consider the standard model with local scale invariance. The theory shows exact scale invariance of dimensionally regulated action. We show that massless gauge fields, which may be abelian or non-abelian, lead to vanishing contribution…
A diverse set of observations now compellingly suggest that Universe possesses a nonzero cosmological constant. In the context of quantum-field theory a cosmological constant corresponds to the energy density of the vacuum, and the wanted…
We consider a quintessential sector realized on a hidden brane with a tiny warp factor, which implies a small value of the effective four-dimensional cosmological constant through an equation of motion for the quintessential scalar.
Scale invariant (transverse) gravitational theories are introduced. They are invariant under pure metric rescalings (i.e. the matter fields are inert under those). This symmetry forbids the presence of a cosmological constant. Those…
Quintessence -- the energy density of a slowly evolving scalar field -- may constitute a dynamical form of the homogeneous dark energy in the universe. We review the basic idea in the light of the cosmological constant problem. Cosmological…
A mechanism to control the cosmological constant through a scalar field non-minimally coupled to gravity is proposed. By utilizing non-minimal phantom or quintessence, the cosmological constant, which may be large originally, can be…
The quantum field theory prediction of the cosmological constant is 120 orders of magnitude higher than the observed value. This is known as the cosmological constant problem. Here, we deal with the cosmological constant as a scalar field…
There is some evidence that the Universe is presently undergoing accelerating expansion. This has restored some credit to the scenarios with a non-vanishing cosmological constant. From the point of view of a theory of fundamental…
We discuss the naturalness of exponential potentials for quintessence, showing that the resulting almost flat direction in the space of scalar fields, as well as the small time dependent cosmon mass, can be related to an anomalous…
Recently a scale invariant theory of gravity was constructed by imposing a conformal symmetry on general relativity. The imposition of this symmetry changed the configuration space from superspace - the space of all Riemannian 3-metrics…
The mystery of the cosmological constant is probably the most pressing obstacle to significantly improving the models of elementary particle physics derived from string theory. The problem arises because in the standard framework of low…
Dynamical vacuum energy or quintessence, a slowly varying and spatially inhomogeneous component of the energy density with negative pressure, is currently consistent with the observational data. One potential difficulty with the idea of…
The cosmological constant problem can be understood as the failure of the decoupling principle behind effective field theory, so that some quantities in the low-energy theory are extremely sensitive to the high-energy properties. While this…
We consider a dynamical approach to the cosmological constant. There is a scalar field with a potential whose minimum occurs at a generic, but negative, value for the vacuum energy, and it has a non-standard kinetic term whose coefficient…
It will be argued here that the cosmological constant problem exists because of the way the vacuum is defined in quantum field theory. It has been known for some time that for QFT to be gauge invariant certain terms--such as part of the…
A `bouncing' cosmological model is proposed in the context of a Weyl-invariant scalar-tensor (WIST) theory of gravity. In addition to being Weyl-invariant the theory is U(1)-symmetric and has a conserved global charge. The entire cosmic…
Horava-Lifshitz theory of gravity with detailed balance is plagued by the presence of a negative bare (or geometrical) cosmological constant which makes its cosmology clash with observations. We argue that adding the effects of the large…
The cosmological constant problem is turned around to argue for a new foundational physics postulate underlying a consistent quantum theory of gravity and matter, such as string theory. This postulate is a quantum equivalence principle…