Which part of the stress-energy tensor gravitates?
arXiv:2001.04993 · doi:10.1103/PhysRevD.101.043513
Abstract
We consider the possibility that, in the semiclassical Einstein equation for cosmological spacetimes, gravity is sourced by the amount of stress-energy that is above that of the instantaneous ground state. For this possibility to be consistent, the Bianchi identities must continue to hold. This is nontrivial because it means that the ground state expectation value of the stress-energy tensor must be covariantly conserved in spite of the fact that the ground state is generally a different state at different times. We prove that this consistency condition does hold. As a consequence, we find that the vacuum stress-energy which is above the instantaneous ground state does not renormalize the cosmological constant, as long as the instantaneous ground states and the instantaneous adiabatic vacua exist.
arXiv comment15 pages, 1 figure. Accepted to PRD
References in corpus (10)
- Everything You Always Wanted To Know About The Cosmological Constant Problem (But Were Afraid To Ask)
- A note on inflation and transplanckian physics
- On the Theory of Fermionic Preheating
- A Simple Method for One-Loop Renormalization in Curved Space-Time
- Vacuum Choices and the Predictions of Inflation
- Considerations Concerning the Contributions of Fundamental Particles to the Vacuum Energy Density
- Novel quantum initial conditions for inflation
- Mode-sum construction of the two-point functions for the Stueckelberg vector fields in the Poincaré patch of de Sitter space
- Stress-Energy Tensor of Adiabatic Vacuum in Friedmann-Robertson-Walker Spacetimes
- Determination of the UV cut-off from the observed value of the Universe acceleration