Statistical description of massless excitations within a sphere with a linear equation of state and the dark energy case

TL;DR

This paper extends previous work on massless excitations in spherical regions, demonstrating the possibility of stable dark energy configurations with quantum corrections, and exploring their implications for cosmology.

Contribution

It generalizes the theorem for massless excitations to any spherical box and shows how dark energy can be modeled with quantum-corrected massless excitations.

Findings

Stable macroscopic dark energy configurations are possible.

Dark energy can be described by massless excitations with a discrete spectrum.

Quantum corrections influence the energy scaling in these configurations.

Abstract

In this paper we continue the investigations present in \cite{1}-\cite{3}. In particular, we extend the theorem proved in \cite{3} to any massless excitation in a given spherical box. As a first interesting result, we show that it is possible, contrary to the black hole case studied in detail in \cite{1,2,3}, to build macroscopic configurations with a dark energy equation of state. To this purpose, by requiring a stable configuration, a macroscopic dark fluid is obtained with an internal energy $U$ scaling as the volume $V$, but with a fundamental correction looking like $\sim 1/R$ motivated by quantum fluctuations. Thanks to the proposition in section 3 (and in \cite{3} for gravitons), one can depict the dark energy in terms of massless excitations with a discrete spectrum. This fact open the possibility to test a possible physical mechanism converting usual radiation into dark energy in a macroscopic configuration, also in a cosmological context. In fact, for example, in a Friedmann flat universe with a cosmological constant particles are marginally trapped at the Hubble horizon for any given comoving observer.