Irrational Monodromies of Vacuum Energy

Abstract

We present a theory with axion flux monodromies coupled to gravity, that reduces to the local vacuum energy sequester below the axion mass scales. If the axion potentials include a term generated by nonperturbative couplings to gauge sectors, with a decay constant incommensurate with monodromy periods, the low energy potential germinates a landscape of irrational axion vacua, with arbitrarily small cosmological constants. The sensitivity of the values of cosmological constants to unknown UV physics can be greatly reduced. The variation of the cosmological constant in each vacuum, from one order in perturbation theory to the next, can be much smaller than the naïve cutoff. The nonperturbative transitions in the early universe between the vacua populate this landscape, similar to the case of irrational axion. In such a landscape of vacua a small cosmological constant can naturally emerge.

21 pages LaTeX, 1 .pdf figure v3: additional discussion, comments and refs added; final version accepted in JHEP

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Cited by in corpus (6)

• Cosmic Birefringence from Monodromic Axion Dark Energy
• Losing the trace to find dynamical Newton or Planck constants
• Hidden Variables of Gravity and Geometry and the Cosmological Constant Problem
• Generalised scalar-tensor theories and self-tuning
• A natural theory of dark energy
• Why $w\ne -1$? Anthropic Selection in a $\Lambda$ + Axion Dark Energy Model