Aspects of nonlocality in quantum field theory, quantum gravity and cosmology

This paper contains a collection of essays on nonlocal phenomena in quantum field theory, gravity and cosmology. Mechanisms of nonlocal contributions to the quantum effective action are discussed within the covariant perturbation expansion in field strengths and spacetime curvatures. Euclidean version of the Schwinger–Keldysh technique for quantum expectation values is presented as a special rule of obtaining the nonlocal effective equations of motion for the mean quantum field from the Euclidean effective action. This rule is applied to a new model of ghost free nonlocal cosmology which can generate the de Sitter (dS) cosmological evolution at an arbitrary value of Λ — a model of dark energy with the dynamical scale selected by a kind of a scaling symmetry breaking mechanism. This model is shown to interpolate between the superhorizon phase of a scalar mediated gravity and the short distance general relativistic limit in a special metric frame related by a nonlocal conformal transformation to the original metric