English

A technical analog of the cosmological constant problem and a solution thereof

High Energy Physics - Theory 2021-05-12 v1 Other Condensed Matter General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology

Abstract

The near vanishing of the cosmological constant is one of the most puzzling open problems in theoretical physics. We consider a system, the so-called framid, that features a technically similar problem. Its stress-energy tensor has a Lorentz-invariant expectation value on the ground state, yet there are no standard, symmetry-based selection rules enforcing this, since the ground state spontaneously breaks boosts. We verify the Lorentz invariance of the expectation value in question with explicit one-loop computations. These, however, yield the expected result only thanks to highly nontrivial cancellations, which are quite mysterious from the low-energy effective theory viewpoint.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2101.11620,
  title  = {A technical analog of the cosmological constant problem and a solution thereof},
  author = {Ioanna Kourkoulou and Alberto Nicolis and Guanhao Sun},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2101.11620},
  year   = {2021}
}

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28 pages