- 1Mathematics Department, California State University Fresno, Fresno, CA, United States
- 2Physics Department, California State University Fresno, Fresno, CA, United States
The existence of a small, non-zero cosmological constant is one of the major puzzles in fundamental physics. Naively, quantum field theory arguments would imply a cosmological constant which is up to 10,120 times larger than the observed one. It is believed a comprehensive theory of quantum gravity would resolve this enormous mismatch between theory and observation. In this work, we study the ability of generalized uncertainty principle (GUP) models, which are phenomenologically motivated models of quantum gravity, to address the cosmological constant problem. In particular, we focus on how these GUP models may change the phase space of QFT, and how this affects the momentum space integration of the zero-point energies of normal modes of fields. We point out several issues that make it unlikely that GUP models, in their current form, would be able to adequately address the cosmological constant problem.
1 Introduction
A theory of quantum gravity, although not yet a reality, has been advertised as being able to solve many of the ills of classical general relativity, such as the singularities that occur in black hole and cosmological solutions (Penrose, 1965; Hawking and R Ellis, 1973). Quantum gravity is also supposed to resolve some of the issues surrounding the results of applying quantum field theory in a curved space-time such as what happens to a black hole at the end of evaporating via Hawking radiation (Hawking, 1975), and what happens to the information stored in a black hole due to this evaporation (Susskind and Lindesay, 2005).
The puzzle we address in this work is the apparent mismatch between the observed cosmological constant and the theoretically calculated cosmological constant—a conundrum known as the cosmological constant problem. This cosmological constant problem has been known for a long time. A nice relatively recent review of the issue is reference (Weinberg, 1989). The problem is that having a cosmological constant, Λ, is equivalent to having a constant energy density, ρvac, as a source in the Einstein field equations. The relationship is (using the units and notation of (Weinberg, 1989))
The subscript vac comes from quantum field theory where one obtains a constant vacuum energy density by adding up all the energy zero modes of vacuum quantum fields. The zero modes are given by
Note that
2 Generalized uncertainty principle and quantum gravity
One of the proposed resolutions to the cosmological constant problem is a theory of quantum gravity, a catch-all solution to all open problems in fundamental theoretical physics. In this work, we utilize the phenomenological generalized uncertainty principle (GUP) approach to quantum gravity. The GUP approach to quantum gravity is a bottom up approach [in contrast to the more top down approaches to quantum gravity such as superstring theory (Polchinski, 1998) or loop quantum gravity (Rovelli, 2008)]. There is a vast amount of literature on GUP, with a few of the important representative papers being (Veneziano, 1986; Amati et al., 1987; Gross and Mende, 1987; Gross and Mende, 1988; Amati et al., 1988; Amati et al., 1989; Amati et al., 1990; Maggiore, 1993; Garay, 1995; Kempf et al., 1995; Adler and Santiago, 1999; Scardigli, 1999; Adler et al., 2001). After this original burst of work on GUP there were various other works, a sample of where can be found in references (Myung et al., 2007; Zhu et al., 2009; Chemissany et al., 2011; Das and Mann, 2011; Sprenger et al., 2011; Ali et al., 2015; Anacleto et al., 2015; Garattini and Faizal, 2016) which further developed this area of research. There are also some very recent works (Tamburini and Licata, 2020; Fadel and Maggiore, 2022) which deal with the algebraic and physical structure of spacetime in connection with GUP.
The basic idea is that quantum gravity should modify the standard position and momentum commutator of canonical quantum mechanics from
In this model the position and momentum as given by
i.e., the position operator is modified but the momentum operator is not. The constant β is a phenomenological parameter that characterizes the scale at which quantum gravity effects become important. Conventionally, it is thought β should be of the Planck scale i.e.
• Equations 3, 4 have a minimum length of
• In order for position and momentum operators to be symmetric i.e. (⟨ψ|pi)|ϕ⟩ = ⟨ψ|(pi|ϕ⟩) and (⟨ψ|xi)|ϕ⟩ = ⟨ψ|(xi|ϕ⟩), the scalar product of this model needs to be given by
The modification of the scalar product as given by (5) is for three dimensions, but in n dimensions one still has the same modifying factor for the momentum integration, namely
the scalar product must take the form
These results from (5) and (7) will become important in the next section.
3 GUP and its effects on vacuum energy calculations
3.1 Vacuum energy in KMM GUP
The main issue we want to examine is how GUP affects the calculation of the vacuum energy and cosmological constant as laid out in (1), (2), and the surrounding discussion. One of the earliest and most impactful works dealing with the cosmological constant problem in the context of GUPs is the work by Chang et al. (Chang et al., 2002). In their work, the authors calculate how the GUP, as defined by (3) and (4), modifies Liouville’s theorem and the phase space volume, i.e. dnx dnp, in n spatial dimensions. The modified phase space found in (Chang et al., 2002) for the GUP from (3) and (4) is
The volume in (8) is integrated out (∫dnx → V). Upon quantization, the claimed phase space volume from (Chang et al., 2002) becomes
Recall we are using units with ℏ = 1 as consistent with reference (Weinberg, 1989). Thus, to compare 9) with the result in (Chang et al., 2002), one should replace the factor 2π by 2πℏ in the denominator above. Using the result in (9) for three spatial dimensions, the calculation of ρvac via 2) changes to
Since the integrand of (10) is
If one takes β to be of the Planck scale, then the result from (11) still leaves the GUP modified vacuum energy to be about 118 orders of magnitude larger than the measured vacuum energy of ρvac ≈ 10–47 GeV−4. In fact, by comparing 2) and 11) and using dimensional analysis, one finds that
However, there may be an additional problem with the integration over the momentum in (10): it appears to disagree with the momentum integration from (Kempf et al., 1995), as given by the definition of the scalar product in (5) or more generally in (7). In the momentum space integration in (5), there is only one factor of
The derivation of the phase space volume carried out in (Chang et al., 2002) that gave the result in (8) is long, but straight forward, so it is hard to see any problem with this result. On the other hand, having a momentum space volume that has a factor of
One potential solution to the difference in the integration factors between 5) and 9) could be to reconsider the spatial/volume calculation. In the transition from (8) to (9), it is assumed that the real spatial volume with GUP is the same as without GUP, that is, ∫dnx = V. The introduction of a minimal length may change the calculation of volumes in some way. If one could argue the n − 1 factors of
For low energy/momentum, where
If the momentum space integration is now given by one factor of
3.2 Alternative GUP and the associated vacuum energy
From the generalized modified position operators of (6) and the associated modified momentum integration in (7), one can see that the integrand for ρvac will be of order
From (6), we see that (13) implies
which has an integrand that exponentially decays with momentum. In (14) we set the rest mass equal to zero (m = 0), and used
Thus, with this GUP model we do get a finite vacuum energy density while maintaining symmetry of the position and momentum operators. In contrast the GUP model given by Equations 3, 4, has an infinite vacuum energy density when only one power of
4 Summary and conclusions
In this work, we have examined how the GUP may alter the calculation of the vacuum energy density and the related cosmological constant. In standard QFT, which was reviewed in Introduction section, the vacuum energy diverges and must be cut-off as in (2), which leads to a quartic dependence of the vacuum energy density on the cut-off.
GUP models with their associated minimal length scales provide a potential avenue to calculate a finite vacuum energy density. Having a minimal length implies a maximum energy-momentum which cuts off the divergence in the standard vacuum energy density given in (2). An early work (Chang et al., 2002) led to a finite vacuum energy density given by (10) and (11). However, one of our points was to argue that the calculation of the vacuum energy given in (Chang et al., 2002) by (10) is inconsistent with the requirement that the position and momentum operators are symmetric in GUP models such as (Kempf et al., 1995). This symmetry requirement leads to an integration over momentum as given in (5) for the GUP from Equations 3, 4 or for a more general modified position as in (7). Although, if one takes only a single factor of
In a larger sense, GUPs may not be able to resolve the cosmological constant problem. We presented an GUP model 13) where the integrand in the vacuum energy density decayed exponentially and led to a finite integral. However, this led to the same quartic momentum behavior as the in “by-hand” cutoff of (2) which were all essentially the same up to multiplicative factors of order one. Regardless, the end result for all the models is more or less the same.
There may be a way for a GUP model to address the cosmological constant problem by requiring the function
Data availability statement
The original contributions presented in the study are included in the article/Supplementary Material, further inquiries can be directed to the corresponding author.
Author contributions
All authors listed have made a substantial, direct, and intellectual contribution to the work and approved it for publication.
Funding
This research was Funded by a CSM 2022 RSCA awards.
Conflict of interest
The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.
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Keywords: generalized uncertainty principle, cosmological constant, minimal length, vacuum energy density, quantum vacuum
Citation: Bishop M, Contreras J, Martin P and Singleton D (2022) Comments on the cosmological constant in generalized uncertainty models. Front. Astron. Space Sci. 9:978898. doi: 10.3389/fspas.2022.978898
Received: 27 June 2022; Accepted: 28 July 2022;
Published: 23 August 2022.
Edited by:
Matthew J. Lake, National Astronomical Research Institute of Thailand, ThailandReviewed by:
Fabiano Feleppa, Utrecht University, NetherlandsIgnazio Licata, Institute for Scientific Methodology (ISEM), Italy
Copyright © 2022 Bishop, Contreras, Martin and Singleton. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
*Correspondence: Michael Bishop, bWliaXNob3BAbWFpbC5mcmVzbm9zdGF0ZS5lZHU=; Joey Contreras, bWtmZXRjaEBtYWlsLmZyZXNub3N0YXRlLmVkdQ==; Peter Martin, a290b3IyQG1haWwuZnJlc25vc3RhdGUuZWR1; Douglas Singleton, ZG91Z3NAY3N1ZnJlc25vLmVkdQ==
†These authors have contributed equally to this work