Everpresent Lambda - II: Structural Stability

Ideas from causal set theory lead to a fluctuating, time dependent cosmological-constant of the right order of magnitude to match currently quoted "dark energy" values. Although such a term was predicted some time ago, a more detailed analysis of the resulting class of phenomenological models was begun only recently (based on numerical simulation of the cosmological equations with such a fluctuating term). In this paper we continue the investigation by studying the sensitivity of the scheme to some of the ad hoc choices made in setting it up.Comment: 15 pages, 6 figures, Thoroughly rewritte

Evidence for a continuum limit in causal set dynamics

We find evidence for a continuum limit of a particular causal set dynamics which depends on only a single ``coupling constant'' $p$ and is easy to simulate on a computer. The model in question is a stochastic process that can also be interpreted as 1-dimensional directed percolation, or in terms of random graphs.Comment: 24 pages, 19 figures, LaTeX, adjusted terminolog

A Classical Sequential Growth Dynamics for Causal Sets

Starting from certain causality conditions and a discrete form of general covariance, we derive a very general family of classically stochastic, sequential growth dynamics for causal sets. The resulting theories provide a relatively accessible ``half way house'' to full quantum gravity that possibly contains the latter's classical limit (general relativity). Because they can be expressed in terms of state models for an assembly of Ising spins living on the relations of the causal set, these theories also illustrate how non-gravitational matter can arise dynamically from the causal set without having to be built in at the fundamental level. Additionally, our results bring into focus some interpretive issues of importance for causal set dynamics, and for quantum gravity more generally.Comment: 28 pages, 9 figures, LaTeX, added references and a footnote, minor correction

Towards a Definition of Locality in a Manifoldlike Causal Set

It is a common misconception that spacetime discreteness necessarily implies a violation of local Lorentz invariance. In fact, in the causal set approach to quantum gravity, Lorentz invariance follows from the specific implementation of the discreteness hypothesis. However, this comes at the cost of locality. In particular, it is difficult to define a "local" region in a manifoldlike causal set, i.e., one that corresponds to an approximately flat spacetime region. Following up on suggestions from previous work, we bridge this lacuna by proposing a definition of locality based on the abundance of m-element order-intervals as a function of m in a causal set. We obtain analytic expressions for the expectation value of this function for an ensemble of causal set that faithfully embeds into an Alexandrov interval in d-dimensional Minkowski spacetime and use it to define local regions in a manifoldlike causal set. We use this to argue that evidence of local regions is a necessary condition for manifoldlikeness in a causal set. This in addition provides a new continuum dimension estimator. We perform extensive simulations which support our claims.Comment: 35 pages, 17 figure

Probabilistic and analytical properties of the last passage percolation constant in a weighted random directed graph

To each edge (i,j), i<j of the complete directed graph on the integers we assign unit weight with probability p or weight x with probability 1-p, independently from edge to edge, and give to each path weight equal to the sum of its edge weights. If W^x_{0,n} is the maximum weight of all paths from 0 to n then W^x_{0,n}/n \to C_p(x),as n\to\infty, almost surely, where C_p(x) is positive and deterministic. We study C_p(x) as a function of x, for fixed 0<p<1 and show that it is a strictly increasing convex function that is not differentiable if and only if x is a nonpositive rational or a positive integer except 1 or the reciprocal of it. We allow x to be any real number, even negative, or, possibly, -\infty. The case x=-\infty corresponds to the well-studied directed version of the Erd"os-R'enyi random graph (known as Barak-Erd"os graph) for which C_p(-\infty) = lim_{x\to -\infty} C_p(x) has been studied as a function of p in a number of papers.Comment: 24 pages, 6 figure