Related papers: String Scale Cosmological Constant
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…
Theories of the cosmological constant fall into two classes, those in which the vacuum energy is fixed by the fundamental theory and those in which it is adjustable in some way. For each class we discuss key challenges. The string theory…
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…
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…
In the light of the proposal of hep-th/0207195, we discuss in detail the issue of the cosmological constant, explaining how can string theory naturally predict the value which is experimentally observed, without low-energy supersymmetry.
It is argued that classical string solutions should not be fine tuned to have a positive cosmological constant (CC) at the observed size, since even the quantum corrections from standard model effects will completely negate any classical…
The interplay between string theory and cosmology is very promising. Since string theory will yield a quantum theory of space-time and unify all forces of nature, it has the potential of addressing many of the conceptual problems of the…
We review the current observational status of string cosmology when confronted with experimental datasets. We begin by defining common observational parameters and discuss how they are determined for a given model. Then we review the…
We investigate the line element of spacetime around a linear cosmic string in the presence of a cosmological constant. We obtain the metric and argue that it should be discarded because of asymptotic considerations. Then a time dependent…
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…
In string theory the coupling ``constants'' appearing in the low-energy effective Lagrangian are determined by the vacuum expectation values of some (a priori) massless scalar fields (dilaton, moduli). This naturally leads one to expect a…
The cosmic string theory for cosmological fluctuations is a good example of healthy scientific progress in cosmology. It is a well defined physically motivated model that has been tested by cosmological observations and has been ruled out…
Various contributions to the cosmological constant are discussed and confronted with its recent measurement. We briefly review different scenarious -- and their difficulties -- for a solution of the cosmological constant problem.
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 review the existence, formation and properties of cosmic strings in string theory, the wide variety of observational techniques that are being employed to detect them, and the constraints that current observations impose on string theory…
String theory axions appear to be promising candidates for explaining cosmological constant via quintessence. In this paper, we study conditions on the string compactifications under which axion quintessence can happen. For sufficiently…
Cosmic strings are linear concentrations of energy that form whenever phase transitions in the early universe break axial symmetries as originally shown by Kibble. They are the result of frustrated order in the quantum fields responsible…
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 argue that traditional methods of compactification of string theory make it very difficult to understand how the cosmological constant becomes zero. String inspired models can give zero cosmological constant after fine tuning but since…
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…