Preface

Chapter 9 **Quintom Potential from Quantum Anisotropic**

Chapter 10 **Leptogenesis and Neutrino Masses in an Inflationary SUSY**

H. Pérez-de-Tejada, Rickard Lundin and D. S. Intriligator

Chapter 11 **Light Cold Dark Matter in a Two-Singlet Model 271** Abdessamad Abada and Salah Nasri

Chapter 12 **Where Is the PdV in the First Law of Black Hole**

J. Socorro, Paulo A. Rodríguez, O. Núñez-Soltero, Rafael Hernández

**Cosmological Models 219**

**VI** Contents

and Abraham Espinoza-García

**Pati-Salam Model 241** C. Pallis and N. Toumbas

**Thermodynamics? 291**

Chapter 13 **Plasma Vortices in Planetary Wakes 317**

Brian P. Dolan

The vast amount of currently available data overwhelmingly support the view that our Universe is mainly composed of sources of matter and energy of unknown nature, dubbed dark matter and dark energy. Regular sources of matter and energy, those found in laboratory, would represent a mere five percent of the total, and only a fraction of it appears to be condensed forming stars. Dark sources of matter and energy seem necessary to reconcile the amplitude and correlations of the tiny temperature fluctuations observed in the cosmic microwave background radiation with the distribution of matter at large scales and with the intensity of the light coming from distant supernovae (see chapter I). Though the gravitational effects of these dark sources is manifest from cosmological observations, the existence of dark matter particles has not yet been confirmed through laboratory experiments or observations, and the effects of dark energy are even more elusive and challenging from both the theoretical and the experimental/observational sides. This has motivated new strategies and synergies between different sectors of the Physics community, and numerous experiments and observational programs in different fronts are currently underway or planned (see chapters II, III, and IV) to improve our understanding of the distribution and properties of the matter in the Universe. These studies will significantly contribute to determine whether the current cosmological model is consistent or not, and should shed new light on the viability of the theoretical framework provided by Einstein's theory of gravity or if it should be abandoned in favor of some extension of it (see chapters V and VI).

The origin and evolution of the Universe in the very remote past determines in a very fundamental way what we observe today and, for this reason, observations can help obtain valuable information about the first instants of time of the Universe. As the volume of observations increases and the precision improves, the theoretical frameworks used to interpret them must also be extended and be sufficiently general as to allow for the identification and correct interpretation of new physical phenomena present in the data. This motivates the study of cosmological models without big bang (see chapter VII), of the observable effects that the quantum interaction of our Universe with other universes could have (see chapter VIII), and of how quantum gravity and new symmetries of nature could influence the inflationary era and the primordial generation of standard matter and dark matter particles (see chapters IX,X, and XI).

All these open questions provide a flavor of the research avenues currently followed in the field of Cosmology and will have an important impact on the shape of this discipline in the future. The theory of black holes and the consistency of their thermodynamical properties, and recent phenomena observed in solar winds interacting with planetary atmospheres are also covered in this book (see chapters XII and XIII, respectively). As all these are active areas of research not always fully settled, the idea of having different voices presenting these topics and defending their own views is, in my opinion, an excellent scientific and communicative exercise. For this reason, I would like to transmit to the authors of this book my most sincere gratitude for their contributions and my deepest admiration for their work.

**Gonzalo J. Olmo**

**Chapter 1**

**Cosmological Constant and Dark Energy: Historical**

In this Chapter we are going to discuss about the large scale structure of the Universe. In particular, about the laws of Physics which allow us to describe and try to understand the present Universe behavior as a whole, as a global structure. These physical laws, when they are brought to their most extreme consequences---to their limits in their respective domains of applicability---are able to give us a plausible idea of how the origin of our Universe could happen to occur and also of how, expectedly, its future evolution and its end will finally

The vision we have now of the so-called global or large-scale Universe (what astrophysicists term the extragalactic Universe) began to get shape during the second and third decades of the past Century. We should start by saying that, at that time, everybody thought that the Universe was reduced to just our own galaxy, the Milky Way. It is indeed true that a very large number of nebulae had been observed by then, but there was no clear proof that these objects were not within the domains of our own galaxy. Actually, the first nebulae had been already identified many centuries ago by Ptolemy who, in his celebrated work Almagest [1], reported five in AD 150. Later, Persian, Arabic and Chinese astronomers, among others, dis‐ covered some more nebulae, along several centuries of the History of Mankind. Concerning scientific publications, Edmond Halley [2] was the first to report six nebulae in the year 1715, Charles Messier [3] catalogued 103 of them in 1781 (now called Messier objects), while confessing his interest was "detecting comets, and nebulae could just be mistaken for them, thus wasting time." William Herschel and his sister Caroline published three full catalogues of nebulae, one after the other [4], between 1786 and 1802, where a total of 2510 nebulae where identified. However, in all these cases the dominant belief was that these objects were merely unresolved clusters of stars, in need of more powerful telescopes. On 26 April 1920,

> © 2012 Elizalde; licensee InTech. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use,

© 2012 The Author(s). Licensee InTech. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution,

distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

**Insights**

Emilio Elizalde

**1. Introduction**

take place.

http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/51697

Additional information is available at the end of the chapter

Research Associate Dept. Theoretical Physics & IFIC University of Valencia - CSIC Valencia (Spain)
