The Cosmological constant and the Wheeler-DeWitt Equation

Understand

We discuss how to extract information about the cosmological constant from the Wheeler-DeWitt equation, considered as an eigenvalue of a Sturm-Liouville problem.

• The equation is approximated to one loop with the help of a variational approach with Gaussian trial wave functionals.
• A canonical decomposition of modes is used to separate transverse-traceless tensors (graviton) from ghosts and scalar.
• We show that no ghosts appear in the final evaluation of the cosmological constant.