Vacuum-driven Metamorphosis

We show that nonperturbative vacuum effects can produce a vacuum-driven transition from a matter-dominated universe to one in which the effective equation of state is that of radiation plus cosmological constant. The actual material content of the universe after the transition remains that of non-relativistic matter. This metamorphosis of the equation of state can be traced to nonperturbative vacuum effects that cause the scalar curvature to remain nearly constant at a well-defined value after the transition, and is responsible for the observed acceleration of the recent expansion of the universe.