The cosmological constant puzzle: Vacuum energies from QCD to dark energy

TL;DR

This paper explores the cosmological constant problem by comparing vacuum energy estimates from astrophysics and particle physics, proposing a toy model linking neutrino properties to dark energy.

Contribution

It introduces a simple toy model using neutrino chirality as an Ising-like spin to investigate vacuum energy contributions to dark energy.

Findings

Vacuum energy from astrophysics is vastly smaller than particle physics predictions.

Neutrino mass scale may be related to dark energy magnitude.

A novel analogy between neutrino chirality and Ising spins is proposed.

Abstract

The accelerating expansion of the Universe points to a small positive vacuum energy density and negative vacuum pressure. A strong candidate is the cosmological constant in Einstein's equations of General Relativity. The vacuum dark energy density extracted from astrophysics is 10^56 times smaller than the value expected from the Higgs potential in Standard Model particle physics. The dark energy scale is however close to the range of possible values expected for the light neutrino mass. We investigate this physics in a simple toy model where the chirality of the neutrino is treated by analogy as an Ising-like "spin" degree of freedom.