We treat the effects of compactified spatial dimensions on the propagation of light in the uncompactified directions in the context of linearized quantum gravity. We find that the flight times of pulses can fluctuate due to modification of the graviton vacuum by the compactification. In the case of a five dimensional Kaluza-Klein theory, the mean variation in flight time can grow logarithmically with the flight distance. This effect is in principle observable, but too small to serve as a realistic probe of the existence of extra dimensions. We also examine the effect of the compactification on the widths of spectral lines, and find that there is a small line narrowing effect. This effect is also small for compactification well above the Planck scale, but might serve as a test of the existence of extra dimensions.
We study the dynamics of a phantom scalar field dark energy interacting with dark matter in loop quantum cosmology (LQC). Two kinds of coupling of the form $alpha{rho_m}{dotphi}$ (case I) and $3beta H (rho_phi +rho_m)$ (case II) between the phantom energy and dark matter are examined with the potential for the phantom field taken to be exponential. For both kinds of interactions, we find that the future singularity appearing in the standard FRW cosmology can be avoided by loop quantum gravity effects. In case II, if the phantom field is initially rolling down the potential, the loop quantum effect has no influence on the cosmic late time evolution and the universe will accelerate forever with a constant energy ratio between the dark energy and dark matter.
We study the Brownian motion of a charged test particle driven by quantum electromagnetic fluctuations in the vacuum region near a non-dispersive and non-absorbing dielectric half-space and calculate the mean squared fluctuations in the velocity of the test particle. Our results show that a nonzero susceptibility of the dielectrics has its imprints on the velocity dispersions of the test particles. The most noteworthy feature in sharp contrast to the case of an idealized perfectly conducting interface is that the velocity dispersions in the parallel directions are no longer negative and does not die off in time, suggesting that the potentially problematic negativeness of the dispersions in those directions in the case of perfect conductors is just a result of our idealization and does not occur for real material boundaries.
With a model independent method the expansion history $H(z)$, the deceleration parameter $q(z)$ of the universe and the equation of state $w(z)$ for the dark energy are reconstructed directly from the 192 Sne Ia data points, which contain the new ESSENCE Sne Ia data and the high redshift Sne Ia data. We find that the evolving properties of $q(z)$ and $w(z)$ reconstructed from the 192 Sne Ia data seem to be weaker than that obtained from the Gold set, but stronger than that from the SNLS set. With a combination of the 192 Sne Ia and BAO data, a tight constraint on $Omega_{m0}$ is obtained. At the $1sigma$ confidence level $Omega_{m0}=0.278^{+0.024}_{-0.023}$, which is highly consistent with that from the Gold+BAO and SNLS+BAO.
We explore the properties of dark energy from recent observational data, including the Gold Sne Ia, the baryonic acoustic oscillation peak from SDSS, the CMB shift parameter from WMAP3, the X-ray gas mass fraction in cluster and the Hubble parameter versus redshift. The $Lambda CDM$ model with curvature and two parameterized dark energy models are studied. For the $Lambda CDM$ model, we find that the flat universe is consistent with observations at the $1sigma$ confidence level and a closed universe is slightly favored by these data. For two parameterized dark energy models, with the prior given on the present matter density, $Omega_{m0}$, with $Omega_{m0}=0.24$, $Omega_{m0}=0.28$ and $Omega_{m0}=0.32$, our result seems to suggest that the trend of $Omega_{m0}$ dependence for an evolving dark energy from a combination of the observational data sets is model-dependent.
