Spacetime Foam, Midisuperspace, and the Cosmological Constant

Perhaps the cosmological constant really is huge at the Planck scale, but is “hidden” by Planck scale quantum fluctuations of spacetime. I briefly review this proposal and provide some evidence, coming from a simplified midisuperspace model, that an appropriate “foamy” structure can do the job of hiding a large cosmological constant, and can persist under time evolution.

Midisuperspace foam and the cosmological constant

Wheeler's conjectured "spacetime foam" -- large quantum fluctuations of spacetime at the Planck scale -- could have important implications for quantum gravity, perhaps even explaining why the cosmological constant seems so small. Here I explore this problem in a midisuperspace model consisting of metrics with local spherical symmetry. Classically, an infinite class of ``foamy'' initial data can be constructed, in which cancellations between expanding and contracting regions lead to a small average expansion even if Λ is large. Quantum mechanically, the model admits corresponding stationary states, for which the probability current is also nearly zero. These states appear to describe a self-reproducing spacetime foam with very small average expansion, effectively hiding the cosmological constant.

Holographic Foam Cosmology: From the Late to the Early Universe

Quantum fluctuations endow spacetime with a foamy texture. The degree of foaminess is dictated by black hole physics to be of the holographic type. Applied to cosmology, the holographic foam model predicts the existence of dark energy with critical energy density in the current (late) universe, the quanta of which obey infinite statistics. Furthermore, we use the deep similarities between turbulence and the spacetime foam phase of strong quantum gravity to argue that the early universe was in a turbulent regime when it underwent a brief cosmic inflation with a “graceful” transition to a laminar regime. In this scenario, both the late and the early cosmic accelerations have their origins in spacetime foam.

Entropy and Gravitation—From Black Hole Computers to Dark Energy and Dark Matter

We show that the concept of entropy and the dynamics of gravitation provide the linchpin in a unified scheme to understand the physics of black hole computers, spacetime foam, dark energy, dark matter and the phenomenon of turbulence. We use three different methods to estimate the foaminess of spacetime, which, in turn, provides a back-door way to derive the Bekenstein-Hawking formula for black hole entropy and the holographic principle. Generalizing the discussion for a static spacetime region to the cosmos, we find a component of dark energy (resembling an effective positive cosmological constant of the correct magnitude) in the current epoch of the universe. The conjunction of entropy and gravitation is shown to give rise to a phenomenological model of dark matter, revealing the natural emergence, in galactic and cluster dynamics, of a critical acceleration parameter related to the cosmological constant; the resulting mass profiles are consistent with observations. Unlike ordinary matter, the quanta of the dark sector are shown to obey infinite statistics. This property of dark matter may lead to some non-particle phenomenology and may explain why dark matter particles have not been detected in dark matter search experiments. We also show that there are deep similarities between the problem of “quantum gravity” (more specifically, the holographic spacetime foam) and turbulence.

Metrics with Zero and Almost-Zero Einstein Action in Quantum Gravity

We generate numerically on a lattice an ensemble of stationary metrics, with spherical symmetry, which have Einstein action SE « ћ. This is obtained through a Metropolis algorithm with weight exp(−β2S2E) and β » ћ−1. The squared action in the exponential allows to circumvene the problem of the non-positivity of SE. The discretized metrics obtained exhibit a spontaneous polarization in regions of positive and negative scalar curvature. We compare this ensemble with a class of continuous metrics previously found, which satisfy the condition SE = 0 exactly, or in certain cases even the stronger condition R(x) = 0 for any x. All these gravitational field configurations are of considerable interest in quantum gravity, because they represent possible vacuum fluctuations and are markedly different from Wheeler’s “spacetime foam”.

How to hide a cosmological constant

Naive calculations in quantum field theory suggest that vacuum fluctuations should induce an enormous cosmological constant. What if these estimates are right? I argue that even a huge cosmological constant might be hidden in Planck-scale fluctuations of geometry and topology — what Wheeler called “spacetime foam” — while remaining virtually invisible macroscopically.

Metrics with Zero and Almost-zero Einstein Action in Quantum Gravity

We generate numerically on a lattice an ensemble of stationary metrics, with spherical symmetry, which have Einstein action SE « ħ. This is obtained through a Metropolis algorithm with weight exp(-β2SE2) and β » ħ-1. The squared action in the exponential allows to circumvene the problem of the non-positivity of SE. The discretized metrics obtained exhibit a spontaneous polarization in regions of positive and negative scalar curvature. We compare this ensemble with a class of continuous metrics previously found, which satisfy the condition SE=0 exactly, or in certain cases even the stronger condition R(x)=0 for any x. All these gravitational field configurations are of considerable interest in quantum gravity, because they represent possible vacuum fluctuations and are markedly different from Wheeler's ''spacetime foam''.

Dark matter as residual of topological changes

We investigate in this paper the possibilities that the observed cold dark matter density can be generated by decays of a heavy scalar field which dominate the universe at the quantum regime. Indeed, we present two approaches based on an extension of quantum field theory to the case when spacetime topology fluctuates (spacetime foam, at the quantum regime). In this extension the number of bosonic fields becomes a variable and the ground state is characterized by a finite particle number density. In the second approach it is the gauge-group parameters which became dynamical. This is tributary on the Centrally Extended Group and Cohomology.