Conformal symmetry and the cosmological constant problem

Abstract

We argue that, when a theory of gravity and matter is endowed with (classical) conformal symmetry, the fine tuning required to obtain the cosmological constant at its observed value can be significantly reduced. Once tuned, the cosmological constant is stable under a change of the scale at which it is measured.

arXiv comment8 pages, this essay received an Honorable Mention in the 2018 Essay Competition of the Gravity Research Foundation, v2: references updated, matches published version

References in corpus (6)

• The Cosmological Constant and Dark Energy
• Twenty Years of the Weyl Anomaly
• The effective potential and the renormalisation group
• Categorizing Different Approaches to the Cosmological Constant Problem
• Single-scale Renormalisation Group Improvement of Multi-scale Effective Potentials
• The role of conformal symmetry in gravity and the standard model

Cited by in corpus (9)

• Form Factors in Asymptotic Safety: conceptual ideas and computational toolbox
• Scale transformations in metric-affine geometry
• New Weyl-invariant vector-tensor theory for the cosmological constant
• Scale and Weyl Invariance in Einstein-Cartan Gravity
• Scale-invariant alternatives to general relativity. III. The inflation--dark-energy connection
• Inflation as a spontaneous symmetry breaking of Weyl symmetry
• An axiomatic purification of gravity
• Revisiting the Cosmological Constant Problem within Quantum Cosmology
• Spatial correlations of dark energy from quantum fluctuations in inflation