Monday, November 24, 2014

Talk by Prof. Emil Mottola



Speaker: Prof. Emil Mottola, Theoretical Division, Los Alamos National Laboratory. 
Title: Instability of de Sitter Space, the Schwinger effect and Dynamical Dark energy
Date: Wednesday December 3rd
Time: 11am
Place: Room 241 Nicholson

Global de Sitter space is unstable to particle creation. The O(4, 1) de Sitter invariant state is a 
de finite phase coherent superposition of particle and anti-particle solutions in both the asymptotic 
past and future, and therefore is not a true vacuum state. In the closely analogous case of a constant, 
uniform electric field, a time symmetric state analogous to the de Sitter invariant one is constructed, 
which is also not a stable vacuum state, because of the Schwinger effect. The role of a quantum anomaly
in the growth of perturbations and symmetry breaking is emphasized in both cases. Consequences
of this result for cosmology and the problem of vacuum dark energy will be discussed.

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