title: Gravity-induced vacuum dominance.
abstract: It has been widely believed that, except in very extreme situations, the influence of gravity on quantum fields should amount to just small, subdominant contributions. This view seemed to be endorsed by the seminal results obtained over the last decades in the context of renormalization of quantum fields in curved spacetimes. Here, however, we argue that this belief is false by showing that there exist well-behaved spacetime evolutions where the vacuum energy density of free quantum fields is forced, by the very same background spacetime, to become dominant over any classical energy-density component. By estimating the time scale for the vacuum energy density to become dominant, and therefore for backreaction on the background spacetime to become important, we argue that this (infrared) vacuum dominance may bear unexpected astrophysical and cosmological implications.
authors.affiliation: Instituto de Física de São Carlos, Universidade de São Paulo, Caixa Postal 369, CEP 15980-900, São Carlos, SP, Brazil. william@ursa.ifsc.usp.br
authors.forename: William C C
authors.initials: WC
authors.lastname: Lima
authors.forename: Daniel A T
authors.initials: DA
authors.lastname: Vanzella