A New Look at the Accelerating Universe

Leonard Parker; Alpan Raval

doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.86.749

A New Look at the Accelerating Universe

Leonard Parker and Alpan Raval

Phys. Rev. Lett. 86, 749 – Published 29 January 2001

Abstract

We show that the cosmological model having zero cosmological constant, but containing the vacuum energy of a simple quantized free scalar field of low mass (VCDM model), agrees with the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMBR) and supernova (SNe-Ia) data at least as well as the classical cosmological model with a small nonzero cosmological constant. We also show that in the VCDM model the ratio of vacuum pressure to vacuum energy density is less than $- 1$ . We display the VCDM results for a set of parameters that give a very good fit to the CMBR power spectrum, and show that the same parameters also give a good fit to the SNe-Ia data.

Received 18 September 2000

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.86.749

Authors & Affiliations

Leonard Parker^* and Alpan Raval^†

Physics Department, P.O. Box 413, University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, Milwaukee, Wisconsin 53201

^*Electronic address: leonard@uwm.edu
^†Present address: Keck Graduate Institute, 535 Watson Drive, Claremont, CA 91711. Electronic address: araval@kgi.edu