Renormalized $\rho_{\rm vac}$ without $m^4$ terms

Abstract

The cosmological constant term, $\Lambda$, in Einstein's equations has been for three decades a building block of the concordance or standard $\Lambda$CDM model of cosmology. Although the latter is not free of fundamental problems, it provides a good phenomenological description of the overall cosmological observations. However, an interesting improvement in such a phenomenological description and also a change in the theoretical status of the $\Lambda$-term occurs upon realizing that the vacuum energy density, $\rho_{\textrm{vac}}$, is actually a "running quantity" in quantum field theory in curved spacetime. Several works have shown that this option can compete with the $\Lambda$CDM with a rigid $\Lambda$term. The so-called, "running vacuum models" (RVM) are characterized indeed by a $\rho_{\textrm{vac}}$ which is evolving with time as a series of even powers of the Hubble parameter and its time derivatives. This form has been motivated by renormalization group arguments in previous works. Here we review a recent detailed computation by the authors of the renormalized energy-momentum tensor of a non-minimally coupled scalar field with the help of adiabatic regularization. The final result is noteworthy: $\rho_{\textrm{vac}}(H)$ takes the precise structure of the RVM, namely a constant term plus a dynamical component $\sim H^2$ (which may be detectable in the present universe) including also higher order effects $\mathcal{O}(H^4)$ which can be of interest during the early stages of the cosmological evolution. Besides, it is most remarkable that such renormalized form of $\rho_{\textrm{vac}}$ does not carry dangerous terms proportional to $m^4$, the quartic powers of the masses of the fields, which are a well-known source of exceedingly large contributions to the vacuum energy density and are directly responsible for fine tuning in the context of the CC problem.