Related papers: Precision Cosmology and the Landscape
The fluctuations of the vacuum energy are treated as a non-equilibrium process and a stochastic model for the cosmological constant is presented, which yields a natural explanation for the smallness or zero value of the constant in the…
Recent astronomical observations of SNIa, CMB, as well as BAO in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, suggest that the current Universe has entered a stage of an accelerated expansion with the transition redshift at $z \simeq 0.5$. While the…
The assumption of a flat Universe that follows the cosmological principle, i.e., that the universe is statistically homogeneous and isotropic at large scales, comprises one of the core foundations of the standard cosmological model --…
The evolution of cosmological large-scale perturbations is described in terms of the concordant model based on the recent discovery of cosmic vacuum. It is demonstrated that the process is robustly controlled by a few epoch-independent…
We suggest an alternative framework for interpreting the current state of the visible universe. Our approach is based on a dynamical ``Cosmological Constant'' and the starting point is that a decaying vacuum produces matter. As we point…
The current expansion of the Universe has been observed to be accelerating, and the widely accepted spatially-flat concordance model of general relativistic cosmology attributes this phenomenon to a constant dark energy, a cosmological…
The creation of a quantum Universe is described by a {\em density matrix} which yields an ensemble of universes with the cosmological constant limited to a bounded range $\Lambda_{\rm min}\leq \Lambda \leq \Lambda_{\rm max}$. The domain…
The behavior of the gravitating vacuum energy density in an expanding universe is discussed. A scenario is presented with a step-wise relaxation of the vacuum energy density. The vacuum energy density moves from plateau to plateau and…
We propose a new selection criteria for predicting the most probable wavefunction of the universe that propagates on the string landscape background, by studying its dynamics from a quantum cosmology view. Previously we applied this…
We give a well-motivated explanation for the origin of dark energy, claiming that it arises from a small residual negative scalar-curvature present even in empty spacetime. The vacuum has this residual curvature because spacetime is…
The matter content of the Universe is strongly inhomogeneous on small scales. Motivated by this fact, we consider a model of the Universe that has regularly spaced discrete masses, rather than a continuous fluid. The optical properties of…
The existence of a landscape of metastable vacua raises the possibility that our Universe may have undergone quantum vacuum decay at late times. This work explores how such a transition can be tested with cosmological observables, focusing…
We compute the time variation of the fundamental constants (such as the ratio of the proton mass to the electron mass, the strong coupling constant, the fine structure constant and Newton's constant) within the context of the so-called…
The peculiar value of $\theta$ is a challenge to the notion of an anthropic landscape. We briefly review the possibility that a suitable axion might arise from an anthropic requirement of dark matter. We then consider an alternative…
We suggest that the solution to the cosmological vacuum energy puzzle does not require any new field beyond the standard model, but rather can be explained as a result of the interaction of the infrared sector of the effective theory of…
The paper deals with the scale discrepancy between the observed vacuum energy in cosmology and the theoretical quantum vacuum energy (cosmological constant problem). Here, we demonstrate that Einstein's equation and an analogy to particle…
The early cosmic inflation, when taken along with the recent observations that the universe is currently dominated by a low density vacuum energy, leads to at least two potential problems which modern cosmology must address. First, there is…
In this thesis, the implications of a new cosmological model are studied, which has features similar to that of decaying vacuum cosmologies. Decaying vacuum (or cosmological constant \Lambda) models are the results of attempts to resolve…
The cosmological constant $\Lambda$ is a measure of the energy density of the vacuum. Therefore properties of the energy of the system in the metastable vacuum state reflect properties of $\Lambda = \Lambda(t)$. We analyze properties of the…
A theory of the cosmological constant Lambda is currently out of reach. Still, one can start from a set of axioms that describe the most desirable properties a cosmological constant should have. This can be seen in certain analogy to the…