Vacuum energy sequestering and conformal symmetry

Abstract

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 $\Lambda$ and a scaling parameter $\lambda$ 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 $\lambda$ plays the role of the dilaton. A vanishing or a small cosmological constant is thus a consequence of the underlying conformal field theory structure.Comment: Extended discussion on the conformal symmetry. Matches the published versio