DARK ENERGY AS EXTRA-DIMENSIONAL GRAVITY

The nature of dark energy, which presently dominates the universal energy budget, remains a complete mystery. Models in which it is currently evolving tend to be overly sensitive to initial conditions, and necessarily involve a very light degree of freedom which is very difficult to obtain from realistic microscopic physics. This essay describes recent progress in understanding how the dark energy can arise as a residue of extra-dimensional gravitation, leading to new insights into how dark-energy cosmology might work. This picture produces dark energy dynamics within which couplings slowly run (or: 'walk') over cosmological times. It also has several unusual experimental predictions, including measurable modifications to Newton's Law on sub-millimeter scales and dramatic implications at next-generation collider experiments.