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arXiv · 1507.04158

Vacuum energy sequestering and conformal symmetry

Ido Ben-Dayan·Robert Richter·Fabian Ruehle·Alexander Westphal
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Abstract

In a series of recent papers Kaloper and Padilla proposed a mechanism to sequester standard model vacuum contributions to the cosmological constant. We study the consequences of embedding their proposal into a fully local quantum theory. In the original work, the bare cosmological constant $Λ$ and a scaling parameter $λ$ are introduced as global fields. We find that in the local case the resulting Lagrangian is that of a spontaneously broken conformal field theory where $λ$ plays the role of the dilaton. A vanishing or a small cosmological constant is thus a consequence of the underlying conformal field theory structure.

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Ido Ben-Dayan, Robert Richter, Fabian Ruehle, Alexander Westphal. 2016-05-13. Vacuum energy sequestering and conformal symmetry. https://doi.org/10.1088/1475-7516%2F2016%2F05%2F002

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