Axion Flux Monodromy Discharges Relax the Cosmological Constant

Understand

Linear axion monodromy models modulated with higher powers of fields naturally realize the quantum-mechanical flux discharge mechanism for relaxing the cosmological constant toward zero.

• Working with multiple copies of superposed linear and quadratic flux monodromies, each copy spanned by a pair of fluxes, we show that when the axion is very massive and so effectively decoupled, the membrane discharges relax the cosmological constant toward an attractor $0 < \Lambda/\mpl^4 \ll 1$.
• If we restrict the flux variations and the intermediate flux values to never venture beyond a finite flux range, the terminal value of the cosmological constant will be tiny but finite.
• We show how it can reproduce the observed scale of dark energy, and explain how to incorporate matter sector phase transitions.