Saltatory relaxation of the cosmological constant

By Jonathan L. Feng, J. March-Russell, S. Sethi, Frank Wilczek. 2000

199 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract We modify and extend an earlier proposal by Brown and Teitelboim to relax the effective cosmological term by nucleation of branes coupled to a three-index gauge potential. Microscopic considerations from string/M-theory suggest two major innovations in the framework. First, the dependence of brane properties on the compactification of extra dimensions may generate a very small quantized unit for jumps in the effective cosmological term. Second, internal degrees of freedom for multiply coincident branes may enhance tunneling rates by exponentially large density of states factors. These new features essentially alter the relaxation dynamics. By requiring stability on the scale of the lifetime of the universe, rather than absolute stability, we derive a non-trivial relation between the supersymmetry breaking scale and the value of the cosmological term. It is plausibly, though not certainly, satisfied in Nature.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0693aac66e0fa1608b58558d46ff18d618b3bafb

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Citations in the corpus

Simple de Sitter solutions (2007, background): “These followed earlier work on flux stabilization such as [7,8,9,10,11] and the original realization [12,13] that string theory produces a finely-spaced discretuum of flux contributions to the moduli potential.”
De Sitter Space In Non-Critical String Theory (2002, unknown): “4 and alluded to in [16], this is a de Sitter analog of the breakdown of the semiclassical approximation for black holes discussed in [17].”
Les Houches Lectures on Constructing String Vacua (2008, methodology): “Now, if we are in a flux vacuum with positive cosmological constant, quantum fluctuations can cause nucleation of flux-changing domain wall bubbles [104,119–121], by a tunneling mechanism similar to Coleman-de Luccia bubble nucleation in scalar potential landscapes.”
Towards inflation in string theory (2003, background): “This would simplify obtaining an anthropic solution of the cosmological constant problem along the lines of [80, 82].”
Inflation and string cosmology (2001, background): “This would simplify obtaining an anthropic solution of the cosmological constant problem along the lines of [52, 120].”
Spontaneous inflation and the origin of the arrow of time (2004, background): “One might worry that the de Sitter solution is only metastable, as it would be in the string landscape picture [83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92] or other theories where the de Sitter phase is a false vacuum liable to decay.”