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| | Cosmological Constant |
 | | This term acts like a vacuum energy density, an idea which has become quite fashionable in high energy particle physics models since a vacuum energy density of a specific kind is used in the Higgs mechanism for spontaneous symmetry breaking. |
 | | We don't know what this mechanism is, but it seems reasonable that suppression by 122 orders of magnitude, which would make the effect of the vacuum energy density on the Universe negligible, is just as probable as suppression by 120 orders of magnitude. |
 | | Cardona and Tejeiro (1998, ApJ, 493, 52) claimed that this effect could set limits on the vacuum density only ten or so times higher than the critical density, but their calculation appears to be off by a factor of 3 trillion. |
| www.astro.ucla.edu /~wright/cosmo_constant.html (2264 words) |
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