Abstract
A mechanism for suppressing the cosmological constant is developed, based on an analogy with a superconducting phaseshift in which free fermions coupled perturbatively to a weak gravitational field are in an unstable false vacuum state. The coupling of the fermions to the gravitational field generates fermion condensates with zero momentum and a phase transition induces a nonperturbative transition to a true vacuum state by producing a positive energy gap $\Delta$ in the vacuum energy, identified with $\sqrt{\Lambda}$, where $\Lambda$ is the cosmological constant. In the strong coupling limit a large cosmological constant induces a period of inflation in the early universe, followed by a weak coupling limit in which $\sqrt{\Lambda}$ vanishes exponentially fast as the universe expands due to the dependence of the energy gap on the density of Fermi surface fermions, $D({\epsilon})$, predicting a small cosmological constant in the present universe. (Refer to PDF for exact formulas.)
Publication Date
2004
Document Type
Article
Department, Program, or Center
School of Physics and Astronomy (COS)
Recommended Citation
Alexander, Stephon; Mbonye, Manasse; and Moffat, John, "The gravitational instability of the vacuum: insight into the cosmological constant problem" (2004). Accessed from
https://repository.rit.edu/article/1198
Campus
RIT – Main Campus
Comments
Also archived at: arXiv:hep-th/0406202 v1 23 Jun 2004 The work of SHSA is supported by the US DOE under grant DE-AC03-76SF00515. Note: imported from RIT’s Digital Media Library running on DSpace to RIT Scholar Works in February 2014.