New Horizons in Gravity: The Trace Anomaly, Dark Energy and Condensate Stars

General Relativity receives quantum corrections relevant at macroscopic distance scales and near event horizons. These arise from the conformal scalar degrees of freedom in the extended effective field theory of gravity generated by the trace anomaly of massless quantum fields in curved space. The origin of these conformal scalar degrees of freedom as massless poles in two-particle intermediate states of anomalous amplitudes in flat space is exposed. At event horizons the conformal anomaly scalar degrees of freedom can have macroscopically large effects on the geometry, potentially removing the classical event horizon of black hole and cosmological spacetimes, replacing them with a quantum boundary layer where the effective value of the gravitational vacuum energy density can change. In the effective theory, the cosmological term becomes a dynamical condensate, whose value depends upon boundary conditions near the horizon. In the conformal phase where the anomaly induced fluctutations dominate, and the condensate dissolves, the effective cosmological "constant" is a running coupling which has an infrared stable fixed point at zero. By taking a positive value in the interior of a fully collapsed star, the effective cosmological term removes any singularity, replacing it with a smooth dark energy interior. The resulting gravitational condensate star configuration resolves all black hole paradoxes, and provides a testable alternative to black holes as the final state of complete gravitational collapse. The observed dark energy of our universe likewise may be a macroscopic finite size effect whose value depends not on microphysics but on the cosmological horizon scale.