Dark energy: a quantum fossil from the inflationary universe?

By J. Solà. 2007

164 citations recorded by the source corpus.

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, Λ, whose variation follows a power law of the redshift.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/6f95f93353639ba3727724acb4dd7cbdce040021

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Citations in the corpus

Expansion History with Decaying Vacuum: A Complete Cosmological Scenario (2012, background): “…incorporated in our scenario, specially those coming from recent developments inspired in the renormalization group approach (Shapiro & Solà 2002; Solà 2008; Shapiro & Solà 2009) which may have testable phenomenological consequences for the current universe (Basilakos, Plionis & Solà 2009;…”
Cosmological constant and vacuum energy: old and new ideas (2013, methodology): “In contrast to the standard ΛCDM model, in which the two opposite poles of the cosmic history (inflation and DE) are completely disconnected, the running vacuum models offer a clue for interconnecting them and let the present DE appear as a “quantum fossil” from the inflationary universe [109].”
Possible signals of vacuum dynamics in the Universe (2017, methodology): “An estimate of ν at one loop in QFT indicates that is of order 10−3 at most (Solà 2008), but here we will treat it as a free parameter.”