Vacuum energy sequestering and conformal symmetry

Understand

In a series of recent papers Kaloper and Padilla proposed a mechanism to sequester standard model vacuum contributions to the cosmological constant.

• We study the consequences of embedding their proposal into a fully local quantum theory.
• In the original work, the bare cosmological constant $\Lambda$ and a scaling parameter $\lambda$ are introduced as global fields.
• We find that in the local case the resulting Lagrangian is that of a spontaneously broken conformal field theory where $\lambda$ plays the role of the dilaton.