A new look at the accelerating universe.
We show that the cosmological model having zero cosmological constant, but containing the vacuum energy of a simple quantized free scalar field of low mass (VCDM model), agrees with the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMBR) and supernova (SNe-Ia) data at least as well as the classical cosmological model with a small nonzero cosmological constant. We also show that in the VCDM model the ratio of vacuum pressure to vacuum energy density is less than -1. We display the VCDM results for a set of parameters that give a very good fit to the CMBR power spectrum, and show that the same parameters also give a good fit to the SNe-Ia data.
Parker
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Physics Department, P.O. Box 413, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Milwaukee, Wisconsin 53201, USA. leonard@uwm.edu
Raval
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