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Register a new userDark Energy and the Accelerating Universe
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Joshua Frieman
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The discovery ten years ago that the expansion of the Universe is accelerating put in place the last major building block of the present cosmological model, in which the Universe is composed of 4% baryons, 20% dark matter, and 76% dark energy. At the same time, it posed one of the most profound mysteries in all of science, with deep connections to both astrophysics and particle physics. Cosmic acceleration could arise from the repulsive gravity of dark energy -- for example, the quantum energy of the vacuum -- or it may signal that General Relativity breaks down on cosmological scales and must be replaced. We review the present observational evidence for cosmic acceleration and what it has revealed about dark energy, discuss the various theoretical ideas that have been proposed to explain acceleration, and describe the key observational probes that will shed light on this enigma in the coming years.
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The negative pressure accompanying gravitationally-induced particle creation can lead to a cold dark matter (CDM) dominated, accelerating Universe (Lima et al. 1996) without requiring the presence of dark energy or a cosmological constant. In a recent study Lima et al. (2008, LSS) demonstrated that particle creation driven cosmological models are capable of accounting for the SNIa observations of the recent transition from a decelerating to an accelerating Universe. Here we test the evolution of such models at high redshift using the constraint on z_eq, the redshift of the epoch of matter radiation equality, provided by the WMAP constraints on the early Integrated Sachs-Wolfe effect. Since the contribution of baryons and radiation was ignored in the work of LSS, we include them in our study of this class of models. The parameters of these more realistic models with continuous creation of CDM is tested and constrained at widely-separated epochs (z = z_eq and z = 0) in the evolution of the Universe. This comparison reveals a tension between the high redshift CMB constraint on z_eq and that which follows from the low redshift SNIa data, challenging the viability of this class of models.
Recent measurements of the Cosmic Microwave Anisotropies power spectra measured by the Planck satellite show a preference for a closed universe at more than $99 %$ Confidence Level. Such a scenario is however in disagreement with several low redshift observables, including luminosity distances of Type Ia Supernovae. Here we show that Interacting Dark Energy (IDE) models can ease the discrepancies between Planck and Supernovae Ia data in a closed Universe. Therefore IDE cosmologies remain as very appealing scenarios, as they can provide the solution to a number of observational tensions in different fiducial cosmologies. The results presented here strongly favour broader analyses of cosmological data, and suggest that relaxing the usual flatness and vacuum energy assumptions can lead to a much better agreement among theory and observations.
In the late 1990s, observations of 93 Type Ia supernovae were analysed in the framework of the FLRW cosmology assuming these to be `standard(isable) candles. It was thus inferred that the Hubble expansion rate is accelerating as if driven by a positive Cosmological Constant $Lambda$. This is still the only direct evidence for the `dark energy that is the dominant component of the standard $Lambda$CDM cosmological model. Other data such as BAO, CMB anisotropies, stellar ages, the rate of structure growth, etc are all `concordant with this model but do not provide independent evidence for accelerated expansion. Analysis of a larger sample of 740 SNe Ia shows that these are not quite standard candles, and highlights the corrections applied to analyse the data in the FLRW framework. The latter holds in the reference frame in which the CMB is isotropic, whereas observations are made in our heliocentric frame in which the CMB has a large dipole anisotropy. This is assumed to be of kinematic origin i.e. due to our non-Hubble motion driven by local inhomogeneity in the matter distribution. The $Lambda$CDM model predicts how this peculiar velocity should fall off as the averaging scale is raised and the universe becomes sensibly homogeneous. However observations of the local `bulk flow are inconsistent with this expectation and convergence to the CMB frame is not seen. Moreover the kinematic interpretation implies a corresponding dipole in the sky distribution of high redshift quasars, which is rejected by observations at 4.9$sigma$. The acceleration of the Hubble expansion rate is also anisotropic at 3.9$sigma$ and aligned with the bulk flow. Thus dark energy may be an artefact of analysing data assuming that we are idealised observers in an FLRW universe, when in fact the real universe is inhomogeneous and anisotropic out to distances large enough to impact on cosmological analyses.
We regard the Casimir energy of the universe as the main contribution to the cosmological constant. Using 5 dimensional models of the universe, the flat model and the warped one, we calculate Casimir energy. Introducing the new regularization, called {it sphere lattice regularization}, we solve the divergence problem. The regularization utilizes the closed-string configuration. We consider 4 different approaches: 1) restriction of the integral region (Randall-Schwartz), 2) method of 1) using the minimal area surfaces, 3) introducing the weight function, 4) {it generalized path-integral}. We claim the 5 dimensional field theories are quantized properly and all divergences are renormalized. At present, it is explicitly demonstrated in the numerical way, not in the analytical way. The renormalization-group function ($be$-function) is explicitly obtained. The renormalization-group flow of the cosmological constant is concretely obtained.
It is generally argued that the present cosmological observations support the accelerating models of the universe, as driven by the cosmological constant or `dark energy. We argue here that an alternative model of the universe is possible which explains the current observations of the universe. We demonstrate this with a reinterpretation of the magnitude-redshift relation for Type Ia supernovae, since this was the test that gave a spurt to the current trend in favour of the cosmological constant.
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