{\Lambda} may not be vacuum energy, after all

Abstract

We suggest the possibility that the mysterious dark energy component driving the acceleration of the Universe is the leading term, in the de Sitter temperature, of the free energy density of space-time seen as a quantum gravity coherent state of the gravitational field. The corresponding field theory classically has positive pressure, and can be considered as living on the Hubble horizon, or, alternatively, within the non compact part of the Robertson-Walker metric, both manifolds being characterized by the same scale and degrees of freedom. The equation of state is then recovered via the conformal anomaly. No such interpretation seems to be available for negative {\Lambda}.