2004/01/03 by Ilya L. Shapiro, Shapiro, Ilya L., Joan Solà +2
Physics and Astronomy · #Astrophysics (astro-ph) #Black Holes and Theoretical Physics #Cosmology and Gravitation Theories #FOS: Physical sciences #General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology (gr-qc) #High Energy Physics - Phenomenology (hep-ph) #High Energy Physics - Theory (hep-th) #Relativity and Gravitational Theory #astro-ph #gr-qc #hep-ph #hep-th
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.astro-ph/0401015
Invited talk at the International Workshop on Astroparticle and High-Energy Physics (AHEP-2003). Corrected misprint
openalex publication_date 2004/01/03 · arxiv created 2004/01/25 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2019/06/27 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
The idea of a variable dark energy has been entertained many times in the literature and from many different points of view. Quintessence is just a popular way to implement this idea in recent times, but so far with little success. Another possibility is to think of the cosmological term, Lambda, as a ``running quantity'' much in the same way as the electromagnetic coupling constant. However, the fact that Lambda is a dimension-four parameter implies that it may obey a peculiar renormalization group equation, which at low energies could be dominated by ``soft decoupling'' contributions of the form Lambda ~ H2 MP2 stemming from physics near the Planck scale. This value lies in the ballpark of the measurements from CMB and high-z supernovae. A ``renormalized'' FLRW cosmology of this kind may reveal itself as a sound, and testable, proposal for a variable Lambda model within quantum field theory in curved space time.