Related papers: Vacuum Fluctuations and the Cosmological Constant
We compare quantum hydrodynamics and quantum gravity. They share many common features. In particular, both have quadratic divergences, and both lead to the problem of the vacuum energy, which in the quantum gravity transforms to the…
The vacuum fluctuations of all quantum fields filling the universe are supposed to leave enormous energy and pressure contributions which are incompatible with observations. It has been recently suggested that, when the effective nature of…
The phenomenon of emergent physics in condensed-matter many-body systems has become the paradigm of modern physics, and can probably also be applied to high-energy physics and cosmology. This encouraging fact comes from the universal…
This contribution reviews recent work on a new approach to the cosmological constant problem, which starts from the macroscopic behavior of a conserved relativistic microscopic variable q. First, the statics of the vacuum energy density is…
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…
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…
We will look for an implementation of new symmetries in the space-time structure and their cosmological implications. This search will allow us to find a unified vision for electrodynamics and gravitation. We will attempt to develop a…
A short review about vacuum energy and the cosmological constant is presented. The observed acceleration of the universe introduces a new meV energy scale. The problem is that, theoretically, the predicted vacuum energy is many orders of…
The cosmological constant is not an absolute constant. The gravitating part of the vacuum energy is adjusted to the energy density of matter and to other types of the perturbations of the vacuum. We discuss how the vacuum energy responds…
The discovery that the expansion of the universe is accelerating in time is a major discovery which still awaits adequate explanation. It is generally agreed that this implies a cosmic repulsion as a result of the existence of a…
The Schwarzschild geometry, describing the gravitational field of a spherical mass in classical vacuum, is one of the most famous vacuum solutions of the Einstein field equations. Classical vacuum is an idealization that does not include…
The cosmological constant is normally introduced as an additional term entering the Einstein-Hilbert (EH) action. In this letter we demonstrate that instead, it appears naturally from the standard EH action as an invariant term emerging…
We study the properties of a class of quantum field theories endowed with an equal number of anti commuting and commuting field variables, the most common example being the supersymmetric models. Based on the scaling properties of the…
The aim of this paper is to reveal the deep relationship between matter and vacuum, and to seek for the same physical basis of the relativity and the quantum mechanics. In doing this, three postulates of vacuum fluctuation are proposed…
In this colloquium-level account, I describe the cosmological constant problem: why is the energy of empty space at least 60 orders of magnitude smaller than several known contributions to it from the Standard Model of particle physics? I…
We discuss the main myths related to the vacuum energy and cosmological constant, such as: ``unbearable lightness of space-time''; the dominating contribution of zero point energy of quantum fields to the vacuum energy; non-zero vacuum…
The $q$-theory formalism aims to describe the thermodynamics and dynamics of the deep quantum vacuum. The thermodynamics leads to an exact cancellation of the quantum-field zero-point-energies in equilibrium, which partly solves the main…
We outline the evaluation of the cosmological constant in the framework of the standard field-theoretical treatment of vacuum energy and discuss the relation between the vacuum energy problem and the gauge-group spontaneous symmetry…
There are now two cosmological constant problems: (i) why the vacuum energy is so small and (ii) why it comes to dominate at about the epoch of galaxy formation. Anthropic selection appears to be the only approach that can naturally resolve…
Physics invites the idea that space contains energy whose gravitational effect approximates that of Einstein's cosmological constant, Lambda; nowadays the concept is termed dark energy or quintessence. Physics also suggests the dark energy…