The Cosmological Constant, False Vacua, and Axions

Abstract

It is suggested that the true ground state of the world has exactly vanishing vacuum energy and that the cosmological constant that seems to have been observed is due to our region of the universe being stuck in a false vacuum, whose energy is split from the true vacuum by non-renormalizable operators that are suppressed by powers of the Planck scale. It is shown that conventional invisible axion models typically have the features needed to realize this possibility. In invisible axion models the same field and the same potential can explain both the cosmological constant (or dark energy) and the dark matter. It is also shown that the idea can be realized in non-axion models, an example of which is given having $\Lambda =M_W^7/M_{Pl}^3$, which accords well with the observed value.

17 pages, LaTex

References in corpus (1)

• Cosmology and the Fate of Dilatation Symmetry

Cited by in corpus (20)

• The Cosmological Constant and Dark Energy
• Unification of Dark Matter and Dark Energy: the Inhomogeneous Chaplygin Gas
• Inflation and Transition to a Slowly Accelerating Phase from S.S.B. of Scale Invariance
• Probing Light Pseudoscalars with Light: Propagation, Resonance and Spontaneous Polarization
• Strongly broken Peccei-Quinn symmetry in the early Universe
• Supercooling and phase coexistence in cosmological phase transitions
• A cosmological constant from degenerate vacua
• Dark Matter and Dark Energy from a single scalar field and CMB data
• Dark radiation as a signature of dark energy
• Acceleressence: Dark Energy from a Phase Transition at the Seesaw Scale
• Cosmologically safe QCD axion as a present from extra dimension
• Future Island Universes in a Background Universe Accelerated by Cosmological Constant and by Quintessence
• Cosmologically safe QCD axion without fine-tuning
• Cosmological Constant, Gauge Hierarchy and Warped Geometry
• Dark energy from coexistence of phases
• A scale at 10 MeV, gravitational topological vacuum, and large extra dimensions
• Hybrid Inflation, Dark Energy And Dark Matter
• Quintessence and false vacuum: Two sides of the same coin?
• Non-perturbative Treatments of the Bosonic String and the Axion with Cosmological Implications
• The Fully Quantized Axion and Dark Energy