Non-Local Modification of Gravity and the Cosmological Constant Problem

By N. Arkani-Hamed, S. Dimopoulos, G. Dvali, G. Gabadadze. 2002

187 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We propose a phenomenological approach to the cosmological constant problem based on generally covariant non-local and acausal modifications of four-dimensional gravity at enormous distances. The effective Newton constant becomes very small at large length scales, so that sources with immense wavelengths and periods -- such as the vacuum energy-- produce minuscule curvature. Conventional astrophysics, cosmology and standard inflationary scenaria are unaffected, as they involve shorter length scales. A new possibility emerges that inflation may ``self-terminate'' naturally by its own action of stretching wavelengths to enormous sizes. In a simple limit our proposal leads to a modification of Einstein's equation by a single additional term proportional to the average space-time curvature of the Universe. It may also have a qualitative connection with the dS/CFT conjecture.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics, Oceanography

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1ea20c209a2c66033eca4af25cfa4a8251abd32c

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Citations in the corpus

Theoretical Aspects of Massive Gravity (2011, unknown): “This mechanism is known as degravitation [53, 54, 52, 55].”
Cascading gravity and degravitation (2007, background): “A phenomenological modification to Einstein gravity that encapsulates this behavior is [4, 6]”
The Cosmological Constant and the String Landscape (2006, background): “have already been discussed in Ref. [ 13 ], which argues that long distance”
Modified Gravity and Cosmology (2011, background): “2 we will briefly review the importance of higher co-dimension branes in the degravitation scenario [61].”
Cosmology and Fundamental Physics with the Euclid Satellite (2012, background): “Such modifications of gravity typically arise in models of massive gravity (Dvali et al. 2002, 2003, 2007; Arkani-Hamed et al. 2002), i.”
Massive Gravity (2014, background): “The idea behind ‘degravitation’ [211, 212, 26, 216] is if gravity is modified in the IR, then a cosmological constant (or the vacuum energy) could have a smaller impact on the geometry.”
Degravitation of the cosmological constant and graviton width (2007, background): “Thus, in the context of large distance modified gravity theories one can ask whether the vacuum energy appears to be small because it is effectively degravitated ? A phenomenological equation describing such a behavior in the four-dimensional language is [3] G −1 N (L 2 )Gμν = 8π Tμν , (1)”