Running vacuum in QFT in FLRW spacetime: The dynamics of $\rho_{\rm vac}(H)$ from the quantized matter fields

TL;DR

This paper investigates the quantum field theory origins of a running vacuum energy density in FLRW spacetime, showing how quantum contributions from various fields influence cosmic evolution, potentially explaining dark energy and inflation.

Contribution

It extends previous work by including fermionic fields and introduces a new adiabatic renormalization method to derive the running vacuum model from QFT in cosmology.

Findings

VED evolves as ff \, m_{Pl}^2 (H^2 - H_0^2) with |ff| 1

Higher order H^6 terms can trigger early universe inflation

Vacuum equation of state shifts from -1, appearing as quintessence today

Abstract

Phenomenological work in the last few years has provided significant support to the idea that the vacuum energy density (VED) is a running quantity with the cosmological evolution and that this running helps to alleviate the cosmological tensions afflicting the $\Lambda$CDM. On the theoretical side, recent devoted studies have shown that the properly renormalized $\rho_{\rm vac}$ in QFT in FLRW spacetime adopts the "running vacuum model" (RVM) form. While in three previous studies by two of us (CMP and JSP) such computations focused solely on scalar fields non-minimally coupled to gravity, in the present work we compute the spin-$1/2$ fermionic contributions and combine them both. The calculation is performed using a new version of the adiabatic renormalization procedure based on subtracting the UV divergences at an off-shell renormalization point $M$. The quantum scaling of $\rho_{\rm vac}$ with $M$ turns into cosmic evolution with the Hubble rate, $H$. As a result the "cosmological constant" $\Lambda$ appears in our framework as the nearly sustained value of $8\pi G(H)\rho_{\rm vac}(H)$ around (any) given epoch $H$, where $G(H)$ is the gravitational coupling, which is also running, although very mildly (logarithmically). We find that the VED evolution at present reads $\delta \rho_{\rm vac}(H)\sim \nu_{\rm eff}\, m_{\rm Pl}^2 \left(H^2-H_0^2 \right)\ (|\nu_{\rm eff}|\ll 1)$. The coefficient $\nu_{\rm eff}$ receives contributions from all the quantized fields, bosons and fermions. Remarkably, there also exist higher powers ${\cal O}(H^{6})$ which can trigger inflation in the early universe. Finally, the equation of state (EoS) of the vacuum receives also quantum corrections from bosons and fermion fields, shifting its value from -1. The striking consequence is that the EoS of the quantum vacuum may nowadays effectively appears as quintessence.