The Gravity Research Foundation has awarded Prof. Samir Mathur the first prize for his essay, "The Elastic Vacuum."  The main purpose of the Gravity Research Foundation is to encourage scientific research and to arrive at a more complete understanding of the phenomenon of gravitation through its annual awards for essays on gravitation with the expectation that beneficial uses will ensue.

In his essay, Mathur states, "The quantum gravity vacuum must contain virtual fluctuations of black hole microstates. These extended-size fluctuations get `crushed' when a closed trapped surface forms, and turn into on-shell `fuzzball' states that resolve the information puzzle. We argue that these same fluctuations can get `stretched' by the anti-trapped surfaces in an expanding cosmology, and that this stretching generates vacuum energy. The stretching happen when the Hubble deceleration reduces quickly, which happens whenever the pressure drops quickly. We thus get an inflation-scale vacuum energy when the heavy GUTS particles become nonrelativistic, and again a small vacuum energy when the radiation phase turns to dust. The expansion law in the radiation phase does not allow stretching, in agreement with the observed irrelevance of vacuum energy in that phase. The extra energy induced when the radiation phase changes to dust may explain the tension in the Hubble constant between low and high redshift data."

Read more:   https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.06963

Read more:  Gravity Research Foundation