2 research outputs found
The IR-Completion of Gravity: What happens at Hubble Scales?
We have recently proposed an "Ultra-Strong" version of the Equivalence
Principle (EP) that is not satisfied by standard semiclassical gravity. In the
theory that we are conjecturing, the vacuum expectation value of the (bare)
energy momentum tensor is exactly the same as in flat space: quartically
divergent with the cut-off and with no spacetime dependent (subleading) ter ms.
The presence of such terms seems in fact related to some known difficulties,
such as the black hole information loss and the cosmological constant problem.
Since the terms that we want to get rid of are subleading in the high-momentum
expansion, we attempt to explore the conjectured theory by "IR-completing" GR.
We consider a scalar field in a flat FRW Universe and isolate the first
IR-correction to its Fourier modes operators that kills the quadratic (next to
leading) time dependent divergence of the stress energy tensor VEV. Analogously
to other modifications of field operators that have been proposed in the
literature (typically in the UV), the present approach seems to suggest a
breakdown (here, in the IR, at large distances) of the metric manifold
description. We show that corrections to GR are in fact very tiny, become
effective at distances comparable to the inverse curvature and do not contain
any adjustable parameter. Finally, we derive some cosmological implications. By
studying the consistency of the canonical commutation relations, we infer a
correction to the distance between two comoving observers, which grows as the
scale factor only when small compared to the Hubble length, but gets relevant
corrections otherwise. The corrections to cosmological distance measures are
also calculable and, for a spatially flat matter dominated Universe, go in the
direction of an effective positive acceleration.Comment: 27 pages, 2 figures. Final version, references adde