Abstract
It has been widely believed that, except in very extreme situations, the influence of gravity on quantum fields should amount to just small, subdominant contributions. This view seemed to be endorsed by the seminal results obtained over the last decades in the context of renormalization of quantum fields in curved spacetimes. Here, however, we argue that this belief is false by showing that there exist well-behaved spacetime evolutions where the vacuum energy density of free quantum fields is forced, by the very same background spacetime, to become dominant over any classical energy-density component. By estimating the time scale for the vacuum energy density to become dominant, and therefore for backreaction on the background spacetime to become important, we argue that this (infrared) vacuum dominance may bear unexpected astrophysical and cosmological implications.
- Received 7 December 2009
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.104.161102
©2010 American Physical Society
Synopsis
Waking up the quantum vacuum
Published 3 May 2010
A quantum field propagating in a curved spacetime can have fluctuations in its vacuum energy density that are large enough to completely dominate its classical energy density.
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