2004/06/23 by Stephon Alexander, Manasse R. Mbonye, Alexander, Stephon +5
Physics and Astronomy · #Astrophysics (astro-ph) #Cosmology and Gravitation Theories #FOS: Physical sciences #General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology (gr-qc) #High Energy Physics - Theory (hep-th) #Relativity and Gravitational Theory #astro-ph #gr-qc #hep-th
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.hep-th/0406202
13 Pages
arxiv created 2004/06/23 · openalex publication_date 2004/06/23 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
A mechanism for suppressing the cosmological constant is developed, based on an analogy with a superconducting phaseshift in which free fermions coupled perturbatively to a weak gravitational field are in an unstable false vacuum state. The coupling of the fermions to the gravitational field generates fermion condensates with zero momentum and a phase transition induces a nonperturbative transition to a true vacuum state by producing a positive energy gap Δ in the vacuum energy, identified with √Λ, where Λ is the cosmological constant. In the strong coupling limit a large cosmological constant induces a period of inflation in the early universe, followed by a weak coupling limit in which √Λ vanishes exponentially fast as the universe expands due to the dependence of the energy gap on the density of Fermi surface fermions, D(ε), predicting a small cosmological constant in the present universe.