Vacuum energy sequestering and conformal symmetry

Abstract

In a series of recent papers Kaloper and Padilla proposed a mechanism to sequester standard model vacuum contributions to the cosmological constant. We study the consequences of embedding their proposal into a fully local quantum theory. In the original work, the bare cosmological constant $\Lambda$ and a scaling parameter $\lambda$ are introduced as global fields. We find that in the local case the resulting Lagrangian is that of a spontaneously broken conformal field theory where $\lambda$ plays the role of the dilaton. A vanishing or a small cosmological constant is thus a consequence of the underlying conformal field theory structure.

Extended discussion on the conformal symmetry. Matches the published version

References in corpus (6)

• Cosmology and the Fate of Dilatation Symmetry
• Quantum scale invariance, cosmological constant and hierarchy problem
• A Manifestly Local Theory of Vacuum Energy Sequestering
• Vacuum Energy Sequestering: The Framework and Its Cosmological Consequences
• Naturalness of exponential cosmon potentials and the cosmological constant problem
• The Big Constant Out, The Small Constant In

Cited by in corpus (7)

• Losing the trace to find dynamical Newton or Planck constants
• An Etude on Global Vacuum Energy Sequester
• Emergent dark energy from unparticles
• The Grand Canonical Multiverse and the Small Cosmological Constant
• Weinberg's No Go Theorem in Quantum Gravity
• More on Weinberg's No Go Theorem in Quantum Gravity
• Tuning the Cosmological Constant, Broken Scale Invariance, Unitarity