MS Seminar (Mathematics - String Theory)

Speaker: Yu Nakayama (Caltech)
Title: Is cosmological constant screened in Liouville gravity with matter?
Date (JST): Tue, Jan 06, 2015, 13:15 - 14:45
Place: Seminar Room A
Related File: 1354.pdf
Abstract: Yes, it is screened under a certain renormalization/regularization scheme.

In the first half of the talk, I, however argue that such a screening mechanism, even if true in d=4, will never solve the cosmological constant problem today. I will review the no-go arguments by Weinberg and Polchinski against generic self-tuning cosmological constant paradigm. Since life is short, I encourage you to leave the seminar room at this point if you are only interested in our universe.

If you do not leave the room, in the second half of the talk you will hear about some peculiar features of Liouville cosmology, detailed computation of the screening mechanism in \lambda\phi^4 theory, as well as how de-Sitter breaking IR quantum effects may be cancelled by IR counter-terms in Sine-Gordon models.