Nonlocality of quantum matter corrections and cosmological constant running

Abstract

Semiclassical contributions to the gravitational action include various terms with zero, two, and four derivatives of the metric as well as nonlocal form factors for these terms. Contributions to some of these terms could be confused with others on a specific metric background or for a particular gauge fixing. We present a critical analysis of the recent works where the tensor structure and the number of derivatives in the action of gravity were not properly taken into account. Taking these relevant aspects into account, we show that although some contributions owing to the quantum fluctuations of massive or massless scalar as well as fermion and vector fields may be attributed to the "running" of the cosmological constant, in reality they correspond to the fourth derivative terms of the action.

Explanations extended, results unchanged, fits the published version. 15 pages, 1 figure

References in corpus (7)

• Effective Action of Vacuum: Semiclassical Approach
• Reconstructing the Distortion Function for Nonlocal Cosmology
• On the non-local heat kernel expansion
• Form factors and decoupling of matter fields in four-dimensional gravity
• Cosmology is not a Renormalization Group Flow
• On the scaling rules for the anomaly-induced effective action of metric and electromagnetic field
• Non-local partner to the cosmological constant

Cited by in corpus (2)

• Effective approach to the Antoniadis-Mottola model: quantum decoupling of the higher derivative terms
• Resummed heat-kernel for surface contributions: Dirichlet semitransparent boundary conditions