Everything You Always Wanted To Know About The Cosmological Constant Problem (But Were Afraid To Ask)

TL;DR

This paper provides a comprehensive, pedagogical review of the cosmological constant problem, discussing vacuum energy regularization, experimental constraints, and potential solutions, with technical insights into quantum field theory and cosmology.

Contribution

It offers a detailed, technical review of vacuum energy regularization, experimental constraints, and discusses various proposed solutions to the cosmological constant problem.

Findings

Properly renormalized zero-point energy density is much smaller than often quoted.

Experiments like the Lamb shift and Casimir effect support the reality of quantum vacuum fluctuations.

Vacuum energy's gravitational properties are constrained by free-fall experiments and quantum tests.

Abstract

This article aims at discussing the cosmological constant problem at a pedagogical but fully technical level. We review how the vacuum energy can be regularized in flat and curved space-time and how it can be understood in terms of Feynman bubble diagrams. In particular, we show that the properly renormalized value of the zero-point energy density today (for a free theory) is in fact far from being 122 orders of magnitude larger than the critical energy density, as often quoted in the literature. We mainly consider the case of scalar fields but also treat the cases of fermions and gauge bosons which allows us to discuss the question of vacuum energy in super-symmetry. Then, we discuss how the cosmological constant can be measured in cosmology and constrained with experiments such as measurements of planet orbits in our solar system or atomic spectra. We also review why the Lamb shift and the Casimir effect seem to indicate that the quantum zero-point fluctuations are not an artifact of the quantum field theory formalism. We investigate how experiments on the universality of free fall can constrain the gravitational properties of vacuum energy and we discuss the status of the weak equivalence principle in quantum mechanics, in particular the Collela, Overhausser and Werner experiment and the quantum Galileo experiment performed with a Salecker-Wigner-Peres clock. Finally, we briefly conclude with a discussion on the solutions to the cosmological constant problem that have been proposed so far.