Disordered Locality as an Explanation for the Dark Energy
(Submitted on 30 Mar 2009 (v1), last revised 4 Sep 2009 (this version, v3))
Abstract: We discuss a novel explanation of the dark energy as a manifestation of macroscopic non-locality coming from quantum gravity, as proposed by Markopoulou. It has been previously suggested that in a transition from an early quantum geometric phase of the universe to a low temperature phase characterized by an emergent spacetime metric, locality might have been "disordered". This means that there is a mismatch of micro-locality, as determined by the microscopic quantum dynamics and macro-locality as determined by the classical metric that governs the emergent low energy physics. In this paper we discuss the consequences for cosmology by studying a simple extension of the standard cosmological models with disordered locality. We show that the consequences can include a naturally small vacuum energy.