The Well-Tempered Cosmological Constant: Fugue in B$^\flat$
Abstract
Zero point fluctuations of quantum fields should generate a large cosmological constant energy density in any spacetime. How then can we have anything other than de Sitter space without fine tuning? Well tempering -- dynamical cancellation of the cosmological constant using degeneracy within the field equations -- can replace a large cosmological constant with a much lower energy state. Here we give an explicit mechanism to obtain a Minkowski solution, replacing the cosmological constant with zero, and testing its attractor nature and persistence through a vacuum phase transition. We derive the general conditions that Horndeski scalar-tensor gravity must possess, and evolve in a fugue of functions, to deliver nothing and make the universe be flat.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2009.01723,
title = {The Well-Tempered Cosmological Constant: Fugue in B$^\flat$},
author = {Stephen Appleby and Eric V. Linder},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2009.01723},
year = {2021}
}
Comments
15 pages, 3 figures