Vacuum selection by inflation as the origin of the dark energy

Abstract

I propose a new mechanism to account for the observed tiny but finite dark energy in terms of a non-Abelian Higgs theory, which has infinitely many perturbative vacua characterized by a winding number, in the framework of inflationary cosmology. Inflation homogenizes field configuration and practically realizes a perturbative vacuum with vanishing winding number, which is expressed by a superposition of eigenstates of the Hamiltonian with different vacuum energy density. As a result, we naturally find a nonvanishing vacuum energy density with fairly large probability, under the assumption that the cosmological constant vanishes in some vacuum state. Since the predicted magnitude of dark energy is exponentially suppressed by the instanton action, we can fit observation without introducing any tiny parameters.

Honorable Mention, 2002 Gravity Research Foundation Essays

References in corpus (1)

• A cosmological constant from degenerate vacua

Cited by in corpus (7)

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• Cosmological Condensation of Scalar Fields -- Making a dark energy
• Probing the star formation epoch with Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) data and high-redshift QSOs
• Vacuum energy and $\theta$--vacuum