In the Dark

Yeterday I noticed an interesting paper which has been on the arXiv for a few months but which has just been published in Physical Review D and has been highlighted by the Editors of that esteemed journal. The authors are Qingdi Wang, Zhen Zhu and Bill Unruh – all of them from the University of British Columbia in Vancouver.

Here is the abstract:

You can click on the image if it is too small to read. As you will see it suggests that we may have been thinking about the effect of vacuum energy in completely the wrong way in the context of Dark Energy.

It’s a long paper (35 pages) which I haven’t had time to work through completely yet, and I don’t know whether it will stand up. I have to say, though, that I’ve long left that the problem of dark energy will only be solved by a fundamental reappraisal of the underlying physics, rather than adding new fields or other such contrivances.

I’d be interested in comments from people who have read the paper thoroughly. I’m flying back to Blighty this evening so I hope I can study the article more thoroughly on the plane.

This entry was posted on May 18, 2017 at 1:56 pm and is filed under The Universe and Stuff with tags Bill Unruh, Cosmology, Dark Energy, Qingdi Wang, Quantum Vacuum, Zhen Zhu. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.