2002 (IPP)
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Item Cosmology with tachyon field as dark energy(2011-07-06) Bagla, J. S.; Jassal, H. K.; Padmanabhan, T.We present a detailed study of cosmological effects of homogeneous tachyon matter coexisting with non-relativistic matter and radiation, concentrating on the inverse square potential and the expo- nential potential for the tachyonic scalar field. A distinguishing feature of these models (compared to other cosmological models) is that the matter density parameter and the density parameter for tachyons remain comparable even in the matter dominated phase. For the exponential potential, the solutions have an accelerating phase, followed by a phase with a(t) ∝ t 2/3 as t → ∞. This elimi- nates the future event horizon present in ΛCDM models and is an attractive feature from the string theory perspective. A comparison with supernova Ia data shows that for both the potentials there exists a range of models in which the universe undergoes an accelerated expansion at low redshifts and are also consistent with requirements of structure formation. They do require fine tuning of parameters but not any more than in the case of ΛCDM or quintessence models.Item Cosmological constant - The weight of the vacuum(2011-07-06) Padmanabhan, T.Recent cosmological observations suggest the existence of a positive cosmological constant Λ with the magnitude Λ(G~/c3) ≈ 10−123. This review discusses several aspects of the cosmological constant both from the cosmological (sections 1–6) and field theoretical (sections 7–11) perspectives. After a brief introduction to the key issues related to cosmological constant and a historical overview, a summary of the kinematics and dynamics of the standard Friedmann model of the universe is provided. The observational evidence for cosmological constant, especially from the supernova results, and the constraints from the age of the universe, structure for- mation, Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation (CMBR) anisotropies and a few others are described in detail, followed by a discussion of the theoretical models (quintessence, tachyonic scalar field, ...) from different perspectives. The latter part of the review (sections 7–11) concentrates on more conceptual and fundamental aspects of the cosmological constant like some alternative interpretations of the cosmological constant, relaxation mechanisms to reduce the cosmological constant to the currently observed value, the geometrical structure of the de Sitter space- time, thermodynamics of the de Sitter universe and the role of string theory in the cosmological constant problem.