Paper detail

Vacuum energy sequestering and conformal symmetry

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.