No Arabic abstract
We argue that the cosmological constant is exponentially suppressed in a candidate ground state of loop quantum gravity as a nonperturbative effect of a holographic Fermi-liquid theory living on a two-dimensional spacetime. Ashtekar connection components, corresponding to degenerate gravitational configurations breaking large gauge invariance and CP symmetry, behave as composite fermions that condense as in Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer theory of superconductivity. Cooper pairs admit a description as wormholes on a de Sitter boundary.
In the investigation and resolution of the cosmological constant problem the inclusion of the dynamics of quantum gravity can be a crucial step. In this work we suggest that the quantum constraints in a canonical theory of gravity can provide a way of addressing the issue: we consider the case of two-dimensional quantum dilaton gravity non-minimally coupled to a U(1) gauge field, in the presence of an arbitrary number of massless scalar matter fields, intended also as an effective description of highly symmetrical higher-dimensional models. We are able to quantize the system non-perturbatively and obtain an expression for the cosmological constant Lambda in terms of the quantum physical states, in a generalization of the usual QFT approach. We discuss the role of the classical and quantum gravitational contributions to Lambda and present a partial spectrum of values for it.
There are many theories of quantum gravity, depending on asymptotic boundary conditions, and the amount of supersymmetry. The cosmological constant is one of the fundamental parameters that characterize different theories. If it is positive, supersymmetry must be broken. A heuristic calculation shows that a cosmological constant of the observed size predicts superpartners in the TeV range. This mechanism for SUSY breaking also puts important constraints on low energy particle physics models. This essay was submitted to the Gravity Research Foundation Competition and is based on a longer article, which will be submitted in the near future.
Working in the context of the Planck scale cosmology formulation of Bonanno and Reuter, we use our resummed quantum gravity approach to Einsteins general theory of relativity to estimate the value of the cosmological constant as $rho_Lambda =(0.0024 eV)^4$. We show that susy GUT models are constrained by the closeness of this estimate to experiment. We also address various consistency checks on the calculation. In particular, we use the Heisenberg uncertainty principle to remove a large part of the remaining uncertainty in our estimate of $rho_Lambda$
We analyse some dynamical issues in a modified type IIA supergravity, recently proposed as an extension of M-theory that admits de Sitter space. In particular we find that this theory has multiple zero-brane solutions. This suggests a microscopic quantum mechanical matrix description which yields a massive deformation of the usual M(atrix) formulation of M-theory and type IIA string theory.
There has been a proposal that infrared quantum effects of massless interacting field theories in de-Sitter space may provide time-dependent screening of the cosmological constant. As a concrete model of the proposal, we study the three loop corrections to the energy-momentum tensor of massless $lambda phi^4$ theory in the background of classical Liouville gravity in $D=2$ dimensional de-Sitter space. We find that the cosmological constant is screened in sharp contrast to the massless $lambda phi^4$ theory in $D=4$ dimensions due to the sign difference between the cosmological constant of the Liouville gravity and that of the Einstein gravity. To argue for the robustness of our prediction, we introduce the concept of time-dependent infrared counter-terms and examine if they recover the de-Sitter invariance in the $lambda phi^4$ theory in comparison with the Sine-Gordon model where it was possible.