Dark Energy from Discrete Spacetime

Aaron D Trout

PLOS ONE, 2013, vol. 8, issue 12, 1-9

Abstract: Dark energy accounts for most of the matter-energy content of our universe, yet current theories of its origin rely on radical physical assumptions such as the holographic principle or controversial anthropic arguments. We give a better motivated explanation for dark energy, claiming that it arises from a small negative scalar-curvature present even in empty spacetime. The vacuum has this curvature because spacetime is fundamentally discrete and there are more ways for a discrete geometry to have negative curvature than positive. We explicitly compute this effect using a variant of the well known dynamical-triangulations (DT) model for quantum gravity. Our model predicts a time-varying non-zero cosmological constant with a current value, in natural units, in agreement with observation. This calculation is made possible by a novel characterization of the possible DT action values combined with numerical evidence concerning their degeneracies.

Date: 2013
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:plo:pone00:0080826

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0080826

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