Small vacuum energy from small equivalence violation in scalar gravity

DOI10.1007/JHEP05(2017)144zbMATH Open1380.83183arXiv1611.07021OpenAlexW3101643741MaRDI QIDQ683051FDOQ683051

Raman Sundrum, Prateek Agrawal

Publication date: 5 February 2018

Published in: Journal of High Energy Physics (Search for Journal in Brave)

Abstract: The theory of scalar gravity proposed by Nordstr"{o}m, and refined by Einstein and Fokker, provides a striking analogy to general relativity. In its modern form, scalar gravity appears as the low-energy effective field theory of the spontaneous breaking of conformal symmetry within a CFT, and is AdS/CFT dual to the original Randall-Sundrum I model, but without a UV brane. Scalar gravity faithfully exhibits several qualitative features of the cosmological constant problem of standard gravity coupled to quantum matter, and the Weinberg no-go theorem can be extended to this case as well. Remarkably, a solution to the scalar gravity cosmological constant problem has been proposed, where the key is a very small violation of the scalar equivalence principle, which can be elegantly formulated as a particular type of deformation of the CFT. In the dual AdS picture this involves implementing Goldberger-Wise radion stabilization where the Goldberger-Wise field is a pseudo-Nambu Goldstone boson. In quantum gravity however, global symmetries protecting pNGBs are not expected to be fundamental. We provide a natural six-dimensional gauge theory origin for this global symmetry and show that the violation of the equivalence principle and the size of the vacuum energy seen by scalar gravity can naturally be exponentially small. Our solution may be of interest for study of non-supersymmetric CFTs in the spontaneously broken phase.

Full work available at URL: https://arxiv.org/abs/1611.07021

zbMATH Keywords

conformal field theoryfield theories in higher dimensionsAdS-CFT correspondencescalar gravity

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Symmetry breaking in quantum theory (81R40) String and superstring theories; other extended objects (e.g., branes) in quantum field theory (81T30) Two-dimensional field theories, conformal field theories, etc. in quantum mechanics (81T40) Methods of quantum field theory in general relativity and gravitational theory (83C47) Relativistic gravitational theories other than Einstein's, including asymmetric field theories (83D05)

Cites Work

• Title not available (Why is that?)
• Large Mass Hierarchy from a Small Extra Dimension
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Cited In (4)

• Conformal structure of massless scalar amplitudes beyond tree level
• Holographic self-tuning of the cosmological constant
• Matter couplings and equivalence principles for soft scalars
• Vacuum momenta of small spheres

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