Vacuum Energy Sequestering: The Framework and Its Cosmological Consequences
Nemanja Kaloper, Antonio Padilla

TL;DR
The paper proposes a reformulation of General Relativity that sequesters vacuum energy from gravity, effectively canceling its effects and addressing cosmological issues like the cosmological constant problem, with implications for inflation and future observations.
Contribution
It introduces a novel mechanism that automatically cancels vacuum energy contributions in gravity, ensuring consistency with inflationary models and addressing quantum field theory divergences.
Findings
Vacuum energy contributions are sequestered from gravity.
The mechanism is compatible with inflationary cosmology.
Future cosmological observations can test the model's predictions.
Abstract
Recently we suggested a reformulation of General Relativity which completely sequesters from gravity {\it all} of the vacuum energy from a protected matter sector, assumed to contain the Standard Model. Here we elaborate further on the mechanism, presenting additional details of how it cancels all loop corrections and renders all contributions from phase transitions automatically small. We also consider cosmological consequences in more detail and show that the mechanism is consistent with a variety of inflationary models that make a universe big and old. We discuss in detail the underlying assumptions behind the dynamics of our proposal, and elaborate on the relationship of the physical interpretation of divergent operators in quantum field theory and the apparent `acausality' which our mechanism seems to entail, which we argue is completely harmless. It is merely a reflection of the…
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.
