The inhomogeneous equation of state and the road towards the solution of the cosmological constant problem
Abstract
We present a cosmological model containing a cosmological constant and a component with an inhomogeneous equation of state. We study the form of the inhomogeneous equation of state for which the model exhibits the relaxation of the cosmological constant, i.e. it asymptotically tends to the de Sitter regime characterized by a small positive effective cosmological constant. The effect of the relaxation of the cosmological constant is observed both for negative and positive values of and for a range of model parameters. A special emphasis is put on the study of the details of the CC relaxation mechanism and the robustness of the mechanism to the variation of model parameters. It is found that within the studied model the effective cosmological constant at large scale factor values is small because the absolute value of the real cosmological constant is large.