Membrane Pregeometry and the Vanishing of the Cosmological Constant

TL;DR

This paper proposes a membrane-based induced gravity model where the large-distance behavior leads to Einstein gravity with a near-zero cosmological constant, addressing the cosmological constant problem.

Contribution

It introduces a membrane pregeometry framework with a two-loop effective action analysis, suggesting a mechanism for the vanishing cosmological constant.

Findings

Large distance behavior described by Einstein action with cosmological term

Maxwell type action for gauge potential included

Physical cosmological constant is shown to be probably zero

Abstract

We suggest a model of induced gravity in which the fundamental object is a relativistic {\it membrane} minimally coupled to a background metric and to an external three index gauge potential. We compute the low energy limit of the two-loop effective action as a power expansion in the surface tension. A generalized bootstrap hypothesis is made in order to identify the physical metric and gauge field with the lowest order terms in the expansion of the vacuum average of the composite operators conjugate to the background fields. We find that the large distance behaviour of these classical fields is described by the Einstein action with a cosmological term plus a Maxwell type action for the gauge potential. The Maxwell term enables us to apply the Hawking-Baum argument to show that the physical cosmological constant is ``~probably~'' zero.