2002/04/04 by E. Kh. Akhmedov, Akhmedov, E. Kh. · 1 citation
Physics and Astronomy · #Astrophysics (astro-ph) #FOS: Physical sciences #General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology (gr-qc) #High Energy Physics - Phenomenology (hep-ph) #High Energy Physics - Theory (hep-th) #astro-ph #gr-qc #hep-ph #hep-th
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.hep-th/0204048
LaTeX, 4 pages. Substantial changes to the text; results and conclusions unchanged
arxiv created 2002/06/04 · arxiv updated 2009/11/30
It is argued that the zero-point energies of free quantum fields diverge at most quadratically and not quartically, as is generally believed. This is a consequence of the relativistic invariance which requires that the energy density of the vacuum ρ and its pressure p satisfy ρ=-p. The usually obtained quartic divergence is an artifact of the use of a noninvariant regularization which violates this relation. One consequence of our results is that the zero-point energies of free massless fields vanish. Implications for the cosmological constant problem are briefly discussed.