Back Reaction of Cosmological Perturbations and the Cosmological Constant Problem
| dc.creator | Brandenberger, Robert H. | |
| dc.date | 2002-10-17 | |
| dc.date.accessioned | 2026-07-07T04:14:19Z | |
| dc.date.available | 2026-07-07T04:14:19Z | |
| dc.description | The presence of cosmological fluctuations influences the background cosmology in which the perturbations evolve. This back-reaction arises as a second order effect in the cosmological perturbation expansion. The effect is cumulative in the sense that all fluctuation modes contribute to the change in the background geometry, and as a consequence the back-reaction effect can be large even if the amplitude of the fluctuation spectrum is small. We review two approaches used to quantify back-reaction. In the first approach, the effect of the fluctuations on the background is expressed in terms of an effective energy-momentum tensor. We show that in the context of an inflationary background cosmology, the long wavelength contributions to the effective energy-momentum tensor take the form of a negative cosmological constant, whose absolute value increases as a function of time since the phase space of infrared modes is increasing. This then leads to the speculation that gravitational back-reaction may lead to a dynamical cancellation mechanism for a bare cosmological constant, and yield a scaling fixed point in the asymptotic future in which the remnant cosmological constant satisfies $Ω_Λ \sim 1$. We then discuss how infrared modes effect local observables (as opposed to mathematical background quantities) and find that the leading infrared back-reaction contributions cancel in single field inflationary models. However, we expect non-trivial back-reaction of infrared modes in models with more than one matter field. | |
| dc.description | plenary talk at the XVIII'th IAP Colloquium `On the Nature of Dark Energy', IAP Paris, July 1 - 5, 2002; 10 pages | |
| dc.identifier | https://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0210165 | |
| dc.identifier | http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0210165 | |
| dc.identifier.uri | http://salesiana.dossiersoluciones.com/handle/123456789/51581 | |
| dc.subject | High Energy Physics - Theory | |
| dc.subject | Astrophysics | |
| dc.subject | General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology | |
| dc.subject | High Energy Physics - Phenomenology | |
| dc.title | Back Reaction of Cosmological Perturbations and the Cosmological Constant Problem | |
| dc.type | text |