Speaker
Description
Was it calling it a blunder the actual blunder? The cosmological constant has always been controversial, to say the least. The past 20 years have seen an uprising of the cosmological constant, after the discovery in 1998 that the expansion of the universe is actually accelerating. This forced String Theory to try to accommodate de Sitter backgrounds into its 4d solutions, something that has proved difficult to accomplish. However, just as Inflation seems to be best dealt with using slowly rolling scalar fields rather than a de Sitter vacuum, so may the current expansion be driven by such fields, in what is known as Quintessence. In this talk I will address the problem with the cosmological constant, explain how Quintessence can provide an alternative, notwithstanding its own difficulties, and how this can be accomplished in String Theory.
| Length of talk | 15-25 minutes |
|---|---|
| Would you be interested in receiving feedback on your talk? | Yes |
| Are you happy for your talk to be recorded? | Yes |
| Will you be pre-recording your talk? | No |
