Cosmology and short-distance gravity

Abstract

If the observed dark-energy density ${\rho }_{\Lambda }$ is interpreted as the net contribution of the energy density of the vacuum, ${\rho }_{\Lambda }\equiv {\rho }_V\sim M_V^4$, and the corresponding vacuum length scale ${\lambda }_V=M_V^{-1}$ as the cutoff scale controlling the low-energy, effective field-theory limit of gravity, it follows that the conventional cosmological scenario based on the effective gravitational equations may be valid only up to the Tev energy scale. Such a possibility would be strongly disfavored by the existence of a relic background of primordial gravitational radiation of intensity compatible with present (or near future) experimental sensitivities.

8 pages, no figures. Essay written for the 2015 Awards for Essays on Gravitationv (Gravity Research Foundation, Wellesley Hills, MA) and awarded with "Honorable Mention". To appear in the "October 2015 Special Issue" of Int. J. Mod. Phys. D

References in corpus (3)

• Leptogenesis
• Trans-Planckian Issues for Inflationary Cosmology
• Global Fits of the cMSSM and NUHM including the LHC Higgs discovery and new XENON100 constraints