Void that is truly empty solves dark energy puzzle - physics-math - 01 September 2010 - New Scientist

Void that is truly empty solves dark energy puzzle: "People have just been taking it on faith that this quark condensate is present throughout the vacuum," says Brodsky. Instead, his team have assumed that the condensate exists only inside protons, neutrons, pions and all other quark-containing particles, collectively known as hadrons (Physical Review C, DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevC.82.022201).

"In our picture, quarks and gluons can't flutter in and out of existence unless they are inside hadrons," says team member Craig Roberts of the Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois. As a result, the vacuum is much calmer and, crucially, the problem it poses for the cosmological constant is reduced.

n 1974, Aharon Casher of Tel Aviv University in Israel and Leonard Susskind, now at Stanford University in California, suggested that a condensate present only inside hadrons could give these particles mass. Brodsky and colleagues are the first to show that this idea also helps resolve the dark energy discrepancy.