Physics – High Energy Physics – High Energy Physics - Phenomenology
Scientific paper
2002-01-15
EPS International Conference on High Energy Physics, Budapest, 2001 (D. Horvath, P. Levai, A. Patkos,eds.), JHEP Proceedings S
Physics
High Energy Physics
High Energy Physics - Phenomenology
15 pages (JHEP LaTeX), 12 figures; Plenary talk at EPS-HEP 2001, Budapest, 12-18 July 2001; Revisions: refs updated, typos fix
Scientific paper
From an observational perspective cosmology is today in excellent shape - advances in instrumentation and data processing have enabled us to study the universe in detail back to when the first galaxies formed, map the fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background which provide a measure of the overall geometry, and reconstruct the thermal history reliably back to at least the primordial nucleosynthesis era. However recent deep studies of the Hubble expansion rate have suggested that the universe is accelerating, driven by some form of `dark' (vacuum) energy. If true, this implies a new energy scale in Nature of order 0.001 eV, well below any known scale of fundamental physics. This has refocussed attention on the notorious cosmological constant problem at the interface of general relativity and quantum field theory. It is possible that the resolution of this situation will require fundamental modifications to our ideas about gravity.
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