Tufts/CfA/MIT Cosmology Seminar, at the CfA:

Tuesday, October 28, 2003
2:30 pm
Gilman Room, Agassiz House, Radcliffe Yard

"Ghost Condensation and Consistent IR Modification of General Relativity"


Markus Luty
University of Maryland

Abstract:

This talk will describe the physics of a "ghost condensate", a new kind of cosmological fluid that can fill the universe and give rise to novel gravitational effects. The fluid has a preferred rest frame, but is nonetheless compatible with maximally symmetric background such as flat space or de Sitter. In these backgrounds, gravity is modified in a nontrivial way at large distances and late times. New phenomena include new contributions to dark energy and dark matter, antigravity, new spin-dependent forces, and oscillatory potentials. All of this new physics can be described by a completely explicit and consistent effective field theory.

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