paper

Reply to `Can infrared gravitons screen ?'

arXiv:0708.2004 · doi:10.1103/PhysRevD.78.028501

Abstract

We reply to the recent criticism by Garriga and Tanaka of our proposal that quantum gravitational loop corrections may lead to a secular screening of the effective cosmological constant. Their argument rests upon a renormalization scheme in which the composite operator is defined to be the trace of the renormalized field equations. Although this is a peculiar prescription, we show that it {\it does not preclude secular screening}. Moreover, we show that a constant Ricci scalar {\it does not even classically} imply a constant expansion rate. Other important points are: (1) the quantity of Garriga and Tanaka is neither a properly defined composite operator, nor is it constant; (2) gauge dependence does not render a Green's function devoid of physical content; (3) scalar models on a non-dynamical de Sitter background (for which there is no gauge issue) can induce arbitrarily large secular contributions to the stress tensor; (4) the same secular corrections appear in observable quantities in quantum gravity; and (5) the prospects seem good for deriving a simple stochastic formulation of quantum gravity in which the leading secular effects can be summed and for which the expectation values of even complicated, gauge invariant operators can be computed at leading order.

17 pages, no figures, uses LaTeX 2epsilon. Version 2 adds important points about R_ren being neither finite nor constant, and that a constant Ricci scalar is not even classically an indicator of de Sitter expansion. Version 3 corrects some typoes and updates the references

References in corpus (38)

Cited by in corpus (68)