Dark Energy and Gravity

TL;DR

This paper reviews dark energy, focusing on the cosmological constant, and explores how understanding gravity differently could address the cosmological constant problem, proposing an invariant gravitational action approach.

Contribution

It introduces a gravity framework invariant under matter Lagrangian shifts, offering a new perspective on solving the cosmological constant problem.

Findings

The cosmological constant problem relates to gravity's nature.

Invariant gravitational actions lead to Einstein-like equations.

Proposes a shift-invariant gravity theory with Lanczos-Lovelock corrections.

Abstract

I review the problem of dark energy focusing on the cosmological constant as the candidate and discuss its implications for the nature of gravity. Part 1 briefly overviews the currently popular `concordance cosmology' and summarises the evidence for dark energy. It also provides the observational and theoretical arguments in favour of the cosmological constant as the candidate and emphasises why no other approach really solves the conceptual problems usually attributed to the cosmological constant. Part 2 describes some of the approaches to understand the nature of the cosmological constant and attempts to extract the key ingredients which must be present in any viable solution. I argue that (i)the cosmological constant problem cannot be satisfactorily solved until gravitational action is made invariant under the shift of the matter lagrangian by a constant and (ii) this cannot happen if the metric is the dynamical variable. Hence the cosmological constant problem essentially has to do with our (mis)understanding of the nature of gravity. Part 3 discusses an alternative perspective on gravity in which the action is explicitly invariant under the above transformation. Extremizing this action leads to an equation determining the background geometry which gives Einstein's theory at the lowest order with Lanczos-Lovelock type corrections. (Condensed abstract).