Topological Vacuum Energy

Synopsis

Topological vacuum energy is a newly formulated type of energy that should provide corrections to the usual Casimir effect and, perhaps more striking, might be a candidate to replace the role of the inflaton in cosmological evolution. This topological vacuum energy is generated by tunneling transitions between different homotopy states of the vacuum in Yang-mills theories. Of these Yang-Mills theories, QCD will be discussed for the cosmological discussion and QED for the Topological Casimir effect. A pedagogical discussion on what this topological vacuum energy is, and how this type of vacuum energy can possibly relate to cosmology will be presented.