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The cosmological constant was originally introduced in Einstein's 1917 paper entitled “The cosmological considerations in the General Theory of Reality”. [2] Einstein included the cosmological constant as a term in his field equations for general relativity because he was dissatisfied that otherwise his equations did not allow for a static universe: gravity would cause a universe that was ...
In cosmology, the cosmological constant problem or vacuum catastrophe is the substantial disagreement between the observed values of vacuum energy density (the small value of the cosmological constant) and the much larger theoretical value of zero-point energy suggested by quantum field theory.
For many years the cosmological constant was almost universally assumed to be zero. More recent astronomical observations have shown an accelerating expansion of the universe, and to explain this a positive value of Λ is needed. [18] [19] The effect of the cosmological constant is negligible at the scale of a galaxy or smaller.
However, the invariance property of physical laws implied in the principle, coupled with the fact that the theory is essentially geometrical in character (making use of non-Euclidean geometries), suggested that general relativity be formulated using the language of tensors. This will be discussed further below.
At the level of Feynman diagrams, this means replacing the one-dimensional diagram representing the path of a point particle by a two-dimensional surface representing the motion of a string. Unlike in quantum field theory, string theory does not yet have a full non-perturbative definition, so many of the theoretical questions that physicists ...
In general relativity, a lambdavacuum solution is an exact solution to the Einstein field equation in which the only term in the stress–energy tensor is a cosmological constant term. This can be interpreted physically as a kind of classical approximation to a nonzero vacuum energy .
The simplest explanation of dark energy is the cosmological constant (the 'Lambda' in Lambda-CDM). This is a simple constant added to the Einstein field equations to provide a repulsive force. Thus far observations are fully consistent with the cosmological constant, but leave room for a plethora of alternatives, e.g.:
a cosmological constant, denoted by lambda (Λ), associated with dark energy; the postulated cold dark matter, denoted by CDM; ordinary matter. It is the current standard model of Big Bang cosmology, [1] as it is the simplest model that provides a reasonably good account of: the existence and structure of the cosmic microwave background;