Related papers: Could There Be Something Rather Than Nothing?
An artificial scale of observable cosmological constant is dynamically related to its natural bare value due to an installation of relevant coherent state for the inflationary field in a finite volume of early Universe, because of…
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…
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…
I describe an approach which connects classical gravity with the quantum microstructure of spacetime. The field equations arise from maximizing the density of states of matter plus geometry. The former is identified using the thermodynamics…
A large value of the cosmological constant (CC) is induced in the Standard Model (SM) of Elementary Particle Physics because of Spontaneous Symmetry Breaking. To provide a small value of the observable CC one has to introduce the vacuum…
Shortly the vacuum component of the Universe from the geometry point of view and from the point of view of the standard model of physics of elementary particles is discussed. Some arguments are given to the calculated value of the…
The possibility of extending the quantum mechanical superposition principle to free parameters such as the cosmological constant appearing in the Lagrangian of physical theories is examined. If the cosmological constant is subject to a…
We consider further consequences of recently [1] revealed role of cosmological constant \Lambda as of a physical constant, along with the gravitational one to define the gravity i.e. the General Relativity and its low-energy limit. We now…
The cosmological constant problem is examined under the assumption that the extrinsic curvature of the space-time contributes to the vacuum. A compensation mechanism based on a variable cosmological term is proposed. Under a suitable…
The accelerating expansion of the Universe points to a small positive value for the cosmological constant or vacuum energy density. We discuss recent ideas that the cosmological constant plus LHC results might hint at critical phenomena…
We propose an approach to explaining why naive large quantum fluctuations are not the right estimate for the cosmological constant. We argue that the universe is in a superposition of many vacua, in such a way that the resulting…
We discuss the cosmological constant problem in the light of dilatation symmetry and its possible anomaly. For dilatation symmetric quantum theories realistic asymptotic cosmology is obtained provided the effective potential has a…
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…
The idea of possible time or space variations of the `fundamental' constants of nature, although not new, is only now beginning to be actively considered by large numbers of researchers in the particle physics, cosmology and astrophysics…
The principles of General Relativity allow for a non-vanishing cosmological constant, which can possibly be interpreted at least partially in terms of quantum-fluctuations of matter fields. Depending on sign and magnitude it can cause…
This is a review of the physics and cosmology of the cosmological constant. Focusing on recent developments, I present a pedagogical overview of cosmology in the presence of a cosmological constant, observational constraints on its…
Recent observations of high-redshift supernovae seem to suggest that the global geometry of the Universe may be affected by a `cosmological constant', which acts to accelerate the expansion rate with time. But these data by themselves still…
There appears to be no natural explanation for the cosmological constant's small size within the framework of local relativistic field theories. We argue that the recently-discussed framework for which the observable universe is identified…
Recent astrophysical observations seem to indicate that the cosmological constant is small but nonzero and positive. The old cosmological constant problem asks why it is so small; we must now ask, in addition, why it is nonzero (and is in…
We have critically compared different approaches to the cosmological constant problem, which is at the edge of elementary particle physics and cosmology. This problem is deeply connected with the difficulties formulating a theory of quantum…