15,563 research outputs found
Dark energy: a quantum fossil from the inflationary Universe?
The discovery of dark energy (DE) as the physical cause for the accelerated
expansion of the Universe is the most remarkable experimental finding of modern
cosmology. However, it leads to insurmountable theoretical difficulties from
the point of view of fundamental physics. Inflation, on the other hand,
constitutes another crucial ingredient, which seems necessary to solve other
cosmological conundrums and provides the primeval quantum seeds for structure
formation. One may wonder if there is any deep relationship between these two
paradigms. In this work, we suggest that the existence of the DE in the present
Universe could be linked to the quantum field theoretical mechanism that may
have triggered primordial inflation in the early Universe. This mechanism,
based on quantum conformal symmetry, induces a logarithmic,
asymptotically-free, running of the gravitational coupling. If this evolution
persists in the present Universe, and if matter is conserved, the general
covariance of Einstein's equations demands the existence of dynamical DE in the
form of a running cosmological term whose variation follows a power law of the
redshift.Comment: LaTeX, 14 pages, extended discussion. References added. Accepted in
J. Phys. A: Mathematical and Theoretica
Cosmology with running parameters
The experimental evidence that the equation of state (EOS) of the dark energy
(DE) could be evolving with time/redshift (including the possibility that it
might behave phantom-like near our time) suggests that there might be dynamical
DE fields that could explain this behavior. We propose, instead, that a
variable cosmological term (including perhaps a variable Newton's gravitational
coupling too) may account in a natural way for all these features.Comment: Talk given at TAUP 2005, Zaragoza, Spain, 10-14 Sep 200
Cosmologies with variable parameters and dynamical cosmon: implications on the cosmic coincidence problem
Dynamical dark energy (DE) has been proposed to explain various aspects of
the cosmological constant (CC) problem(s). For example, it is very difficult to
accept that a strictly constant Lambda-term constitutes the ultimate
explanation for the DE in our Universe. It is also hard to acquiesce in the
idea that we accidentally happen to live in an epoch where the CC contributes
an energy density value right in the ballpark of the rapidly diluting matter
density. It should perhaps be more plausible to conceive that the vacuum
energy, is actually a dynamical quantity as the Universe itself. More
generally, we could even entertain the possibility that the total DE is in fact
a mixture of vacuum energy and other dynamical components (e.g. fields, higher
order terms in the effective action etc) which can be represented collectively
by an effective entity X (dubbed the ``cosmon''). The ``cosmon'', therefore,
acts as a dynamical DE component different from the vacuum energy. While it can
actually behave phantom-like by itself, the overall DE fluid may effectively
appear as standard quintessence, or even mimic at present an almost exact CC
behavior. Thanks to the versatility of such cosmic fluid we can show that a
composite DE system of this sort (``LXCDM'') may have a key to resolving the
mysterious coincidence problem.Comment: LaTeX, 13 pages, 5 figure
Back reaction of vacuum and the renormalization group flow from the conformal fixed point
We consider the GUT-like model with two scalar fields which has infinitesimal
deviation from the conformal invariant fixed point at high energy region. In
this case the dominating quantum effect is the conformal trace anomaly and the
interaction between the anomaly-generated propagating conformal factor of the
metric and the usual dimensional scalar field. This interaction leads to the
renormalization group flow from the conformal point. In the supersymmetric
conformal invariant model such an effect produces a very weak violation of
sypersymmetry at lower energies.Comment: 15 pages, LaTex, ten figures, uuencoded fil
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