Dear Dr B: Where does dark energy come from and what’s it made of?

“As the universe expands and dark energy remains constant (negative pressure) then where does the ever increasing amount of dark energy come from? Is this genuinely creating something from nothing (bit of lay man’s hype here), do conservation laws not apply? Puzzled over this for ages now.”

-- pete best

“When speaking of the Einstein equation, is it the case that the contribution of dark matter is always included in the stress energy tensor (source term) and that dark energy is included in the cosmological constant term? If so, is this the main reason to distinguish between these two forms of ‘darkness’? I ask because I don’t normally read about dark energy being ‘composed of particles’ in the way dark matter is discussed phenomenologically.”

-- CGT

Dear Pete, CGT:

Dark energy is often portrayed as very mysterious. But when you look at the math, it’s really the simplest aspect of general relativity.

Ahead, allow me to clarify that your questions refer to “dark energy” but are specifically about the cosmological constant which is a certain type of dark energy. For all we know, the cosmological constant fits all existing observations. Dark energy could be more complicated than that, but let’s start with the cosmological constant.

Einstein’s field equations can be derived from very few assumptions. First, there’s the equivalence principle, which can be formulated mathematically as the requirement that the equations be tensor-equations. Second, the equations should describe the curvature of space-time. Third, the source of gravity is the stress-energy tensor and it’s locally conserved.

If you write down the simplest equations which fulfill these criteria you get Einstein’s field equations with two free constants. One constant can be fixed by deriving the Newtonian limit and it turns out to be Newton’s constant, G. The other constant is the cosmological constant, usually denoted Λ. You can make the equations more complicated by adding higher order terms, but at low energies these two constants are the only relevant ones.

Einstein's field equations. [Image Source]

If the cosmological constant is not zero, then flat space-time is no longer a solution of the equations. If the constant is positive-valued in particular, space will undergo accelerated expansion if there are no other matter sources, or these are negligible in comparison to Λ. Our universe presently seems to be in a phase that is dominated by a positive cosmological constant – that’s the easiest way to explain the observations which were awarded the 2011 Nobel Prize in physics.

Things get difficult if one tries to find an interpretation of the rather unambiguous mathematics. You can for example take the term with the cosmological constant and not think of it as geometrical, but instead move it to the other side of the equation and think of it as some stuff that causes curvature. If you do that, you might be tempted to read the entries of the cosmological constant term as if it was a kind of fluid. It would then correspond to a fluid with constant density and with constant, negative pressure. That’s something one can write down. But does this interpretation make any sense? I don’t know. There isn’t any known fluid with such behavior.

Since the cosmological constant is also present if matter sources are absent, it can be interpreted as the energy-density and pressure of the vacuum. Indeed, one can calculate such a term in quantum field theory, just that the result is infamously 120 orders of magnitude too large. But that’s a different story and shall be told another time. The cosmological constant term is therefore often referred to as the “vacuum energy,” but that’s sloppy. It’s an energy-density, not an energy, and that’s an important difference.

How can it possibly be that an energy density remains constant as the universe expands, you ask. Doesn’t this mean you need to create more energy from somewhere? No, you don’t need to create anything. This is a confusion which comes about because you interpret the density which has been assigned to the cosmological constant like a density of matter, but that’s not what it is. If it was some kind of stuff we know, then, yes, you would expect the density to dilute as space expands. But the cosmological constant is a property of space-time itself. As space expands, there’s more space, and that space still has the same vacuum energy density – it’s constant!

The cosmological constant term is indeed conserved in general relativity, and it’s conserved separately from that of the other energy and matter sources. It’s just that conservation of stress-energy in general relativity works differently than you might be used to from flat space.

According to Noether’s theorem there’s a conserved quantity for every (continuous) symmetry. A flat space-time is the same at every place and at every moment of time. We say it has a translational invariance in space and time. These are symmetries, and they come with conserved quantities: Translational invariance of space conserves momentum, translational invariance in time conserves energy.

In a curved space-time generically neither symmetry is fulfilled, hence neither energy nor momentum are conserved. So, if you take the vacuum energy density and you integrate it over some volume to get an energy, then the total energy grows with the volume indeed. It’s just not conserved. How strange! But that makes perfect sense: It’s not conserved because space expands and hence we have no invariance in time. Consequently, there’s no conserved quantity for invariance in time.

But General Relativity has a more complicated type of symmetry to which Noether’s theorem can be applied. This gives rise to a local conservation of stress-momentum when coupled to gravity (the stress-momentum tensor is covariantly conserved).

The conservation law for the density of a pressureless fluid, for example, works as you expect it to work: As space expands, the density goes down with the volume. For radiation – which has pressure – the energy density falls faster than that of matter because wavelengths also redshift. And if you put the cosmological constant term with its negative pressure into the conservation law, both energy and pressure remain the same. It’s all consistent: They are conserved if they are constant.

Dark energy now is a generalization of the cosmological constant, in which one invents some fields which give rise to a similar term. There are various fields that theoretical physicists have played with: chameleon fields and phantom fields and quintessence and such. The difference to the cosmological constant is that these fields’ densities do change with time, albeit slowly. There is however presently no evidence that this is the case.

As to the question which dark stuff to include in which term. Dark matter is usually assumed to be pressureless, which means that for what its gravitational pull is concerned it behaves just like normal matter. Dark energy, in contrast, has negative pressure and does odd things. That’s why they are usually collected in different terms.

Why don’t you normally read about dark energy being made of particles? Because you need some really strange stuff to get something that behaves like dark energy. You can’t make it out of any kind of particle that we know – this would either give you a matter term or a radiation term, neither of which does what dark energy needs to do.

If dark energy was some kind of field, or some kind of condensate, then it would be made of something else. In that case its density might indeed also vary from one place to the next and we might be able to detect the presence of that field in some way. Again though, there isn’t presently any evidence for that.

Thanks for your interesting questions!