Conferences
2–8 September 2018, Spain, Greece, Romania
Cosmology and the Quantum Vacuum 2018
This V Edition of the Workshop will focus, as the preceding ones, which took place in Benasque (twice), Rhodes, and Segovia, on aspects of Theoretical Cosmology that are related with properties of the Quantum Vacuum. The longstanding question: Why we do not see vacuum fluctuations at cosmological scale? is still without answer. Now we have indeed detected an acceleration in the cosmic expansion which could be most easily understood as a vacuum effect (dark energy), but the numbers still do not match by many orders of magnitude. Alternative approaches to this problem involve cosmological models which modify the Einstein-Hilbert Lagrangian by adding terms of higher order in the curvature. Terms of this kind should probably be there, since they appear in most attempts of calculating quantum corrections to General Relativity. At this stage, however, modified gravity models should be confronted both with fundamental theories and with the most recent astronomical data.
The Workshop is open to related topics. This includes:
1. Cosmological models: modified gravities, f(R) and similar theories, non-local models.
2. Quantum vacuum effects and its implications in cosmology. Casimir effect in brane models.
3. The cosmological constant problem and quantum vacuum fluctuations.
4. Mathematical physics techniques for quantum vacuum effects.
