Gravitational Quantum Effects and Nonlocal Approach to the Cosmological Constant Problem

TL;DR

This paper explores a local, coordinate-invariant nonlocal approach to the cosmological constant problem, demonstrating its stability against quantum gravitational and matter effects, and highlighting its advantages over previous models including natural inflation.

Contribution

It introduces a new formulation adding an $R^2$ term and topological action, avoiding the need for scale invariance and enabling natural $R^2$ inflation.

Findings

Effective cosmological constant remains stable under quantum loops.

The formulation does not require scale invariance assumptions.

It naturally leads to $R^2$ inflation.

Abstract

We have recently presented a manifestly local and general coordinate invariant formulation of a nonlocal approach to the cosmological constant problem. In this article, we investigate quantum effects from both matter and gravitational fields in this formulation. In particular, we pay our attention to the gravitational loop effects and show that the effective cosmological constant is radiatively stable even in the presence of the gravitational loop effects in addition to matter loop effects. For this purpose we need to add the $R^2$ term and the corresponding topological action as an total action, which should be contrasted with the work by Kaloper and Padilla where the topological Gauss-Bonnet term is added instead of the $R^2$ term. The advantages of our new formulation compared to that by Kaloper and Padilla are that not only we do not have to assume the scale invariance which is required to render the space-time average of the square of the Weyl curvature vanishing, but also our formulation would lead to the $R^2$ inflation in a natural manner.