Erratum: Vacuum effects of an ultralow mass particle account for the recent acceleration of the universe [Phys. Rev. D60, 123502 (1999)

Abstract

In recent work, we showed that non-perturbative vacuum effects of a very low mass particle could induce, at a redshift of order 1, a transition from a matter-dominated to an accelerating universe. In that work, we used the simplification of a sudden transition out of the matter-dominated stage and were able to fit the Type Ia supernovae (SNe-Ia) data points with a spatially-open universe. In the present work, we find a more accurate, smooth {\it spatially-flat} analytic solution to the quantum-corrected Einstein equations. This solution gives a good fit to the SNe-Ia data with a particle mass parameter $m_h$ in the range $6.40 \times 10^{-33}$ eV to $7.25 \times 10^{-33}$ eV. It follows that the ratio of total matter density (including dark matter) to critical density, $\O_0$, is in the range 0.58 to 0.15, and the age $t_0$ of the universe is in the range $8.10 h^{-1}$ Gyr to $12.2 h^{-1}$ Gyr, where $h$ is the present value of the Hubble constant, measured as a fraction of the value 100 km/(s Mpc). This spatially-flat model agrees with estimates of the position of the first acoustic peak in the small angular scale fluctuations of the cosmic background radiation, and with light-element abundances of standard big-bang nucleosynthesis. Our model has only a single free parameter, $m_h$, and does not require that we live at a special time in the evolution of the universe.