Dark energy and gravity

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Publication:2481673

DOI10.1007/S10714-007-0555-7zbMATH Open1137.83382arXiv0705.2533OpenAlexW3105182429MaRDI QIDQ2481673FDOQ2481673


Authors: Yanyan Li Edit this on Wikidata


Publication date: 14 April 2008

Published in: General Relativity and Gravitation (Search for Journal in Brave)

Abstract: I review the problem of dark energy focusing on the cosmological constant as the candidate and discuss its implications for the nature of gravity. Part 1 briefly overviews the currently popular `concordance cosmology' and summarises the evidence for dark energy. It also provides the observational and theoretical arguments in favour of the cosmological constant as the candidate and emphasises why no other approach really solves the conceptual problems usually attributed to the cosmological constant. Part 2 describes some of the approaches to understand the nature of the cosmological constant and attempts to extract the key ingredients which must be present in any viable solution. I argue that (i)the cosmological constant problem cannot be satisfactorily solved until gravitational action is made invariant under the shift of the matter lagrangian by a constant and (ii) this cannot happen if the metric is the dynamical variable. Hence the cosmological constant problem essentially has to do with our (mis)understanding of the nature of gravity. Part 3 discusses an alternative perspective on gravity in which the action is explicitly invariant under the above transformation. Extremizing this action leads to an equation determining the background geometry which gives Einstein's theory at the lowest order with Lanczos-Lovelock type corrections. (Condensed abstract).


Full work available at URL: https://arxiv.org/abs/0705.2533




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