Cosmological evolution of vacuum and cosmic acceleration

Abstract

It is known that the unregularized expressions for the stress–energy tensor components corresponding to subhorizon and superhorizon vacuum fluctuations of a massless scalar field in a Friedmann–Robertson–Walker background are characterized by the equation of state parameters ω = 1/3 and ω = −1/3, which are not sufficient to produce cosmological acceleration. However, the form of the adiabatically regularized finite stress–energy tensor turns out to be completely different. By using the fact that vacuum subhorizon modes evolve nearly adiabatically and superhorizon modes have ω = −1/3, we approximately determine the regularized stress–energy tensor, whose conservation is utilized to fix the time dependence of the vacuum energy density. We then show that vacuum energy density grows from zero up to H4 in about one Hubble time, vacuum fluctuations give positive acceleration of the order of H4/M2p and they can completely alter the cosmic evolution of the universe dominated otherwise by the cosmological constant, radiation or pressureless dust. Although the magnitude of the acceleration is tiny to explain the observed value today, our findings indicate that the cosmological backreaction of vacuum fluctuations must be taken into account in early stages of cosmic evolution.