Related papers: Notes on Vanishing Cosmological Constant without B…
We argue that traditional methods of compactification of string theory make it very difficult to understand how the cosmological constant becomes zero. String inspired models can give zero cosmological constant after fine tuning but since…
It is suggested that the true ground state of the world has exactly vanishing vacuum energy and that the cosmological constant that seems to have been observed is due to our region of the universe being stuck in a false vacuum, whose energy…
Primordial perturbations in our universe are believed to have a quantum origin, and can be described by the wavefunction of the universe (or equivalently, cosmological correlators). It follows that these observables must carry the imprint…
The cosmological constant problem can be understood as the failure of the decoupling principle behind effective field theory, so that some quantities in the low-energy theory are extremely sensitive to the high-energy properties. While this…
It is pointed out that a collider experiment involves a local contribution to the energy-momentum tensor, a circumstance which not a common feature of the current state of the Universe at large characterized by the cosmological constant…
A mechanism for suppressing the cosmological constant is described, using a superconducting analogy in which fermions coupled to gravitons are in an unstable false vauum. The coupling of the fermions to gravitons and a screened attractive…
We argue that in the context of string theory a large number N of connected degenerate vacua that mix will lead to a ground state with much lower energy, essentially because of the standard level repulsion of quantum theory for the…
We compute the one-loop beta functions of the cosmological constant, Newton's constant and the topological mass in topologically massive supergravity in three dimensions. We use a variant of the proper time method supplemented by a simple…
In this article we show that finite perturbative corrections in non-supersymmetric strings can be understood via an interplay between modular invariance and misaligned supersymmetry. While modular invariance is known to be crucial in…
Spontaneous symmetry breaking is studied within a simple version of the light-front sigma model with fermions. Its vacuum structure is derived by an implementation of global symmetries in terms of unitary operators in a finite volume with…
We present a quantization of unimodular gravity in the connection representation for a homogeneous, isotropic, and spatially flat cosmological model without matter. In this model, the wave function is governed by a Schr\"odinger-type…
The quantization of Einstein-Maxwell theory with a cosmological constant is considered. We obtain all logarithmically divergent terms in the one-loop effective action that involve only the background electromagnetic field. This includes…
Cosmic strings in realistic particle physics models have fermion zero modes in the string core. Such zero modes change the underlying cosmology; for example, the string can carry a current. We consider the stability of fermion zero modes to…
Many models for dynamical supersymmetry breaking have the domain wall solution of the Kovner-Shifman type and therefore contain the potential cosmological domain wall problem.We show that the degeneracy of the vacua is lifted in any model…
A value of the cosmological constant in a toy model of the five-dimensional universe is calculated in such a manner that it remains in agreement with both astronomical observations and the quantum field theory concerning the zero-point…
We propose that the solution to the cosmological vacuum energy puzzle may come from the infrared sector of the effective theory of gravity, where the impact of the trace anomaly is of upmost relevance. We proceed by introducing two…
We introduce the notion of background independent quantum field theory. The distinguishing feature of this theory is that the dynamics can be formulated without recourse to a background metric structure. We show in a simple model how the…
We consider a dynamical approach to the cosmological constant. There is a scalar field with a potential whose minimum occurs at a generic, but negative, value for the vacuum energy, and it has a non-standard kinetic term whose coefficient…
In the light of the proposal of hep-th/0207195, we discuss in detail the issue of the cosmological constant, explaining how can string theory naturally predict the value which is experimentally observed, without low-energy supersymmetry.
In this paper we investigate a class of phenomenologically viable $F(R,{\cal G})$ theories that are able to avoid the cosmological constant issue. While the absence of ghosts and other kinds of instability issues is of prime importance,…