Cao, ChunJun and Chatwin-Davies, Aidan and Singh, Ashmeet (2019) How Low Can Vacuum Energy Go When Your Fields Are Finite-Dimensional? International Journal of Modern Physics D, 28 (14). Art. No. 1944006. ISSN 0218-2718. doi:10.1142/S0218271819440061. https://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechAUTHORS:20190709-152651012
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Abstract
According to the holographic bound, there is only a finite density of degrees of freedom in space when gravity is taken into account. Conventional quantum field theory does not conform to this bound, since in this framework, infinitely many degrees of freedom may be localized to any given region of space. In this paper, we explore the viewpoint that quantum field theory may emerge from an underlying theory that is locally finite-dimensional, and we construct a locally finite-dimensional version of a Klein–Gordon scalar field using generalized Clifford algebras. Demanding that the finite-dimensional field operators obey a suitable version of the canonical commutation relations makes this construction essentially unique. We then find that enforcing local finite dimensionality in a holographically consistent way leads to a huge suppression of the quantum contribution to vacuum energy, to the point that the theoretical prediction becomes plausibly consistent with observations.
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Additional Information: | © 2019 World Scientific Publishing Company. Received 12 May 2019; Accepted 10 June 2019; Published 11 July 2019. This essay received an Honorable Mention in the 2019 Essay Competition of the Gravity Research Foundation. We would like to thank Sean Carroll and Grant Remmen for helpful discussions. C. C. acknowledges the support by the U.S. Department of Defense and NIST through the Hartree Postdoctoral Fellowship at QuICS. A. C.-D. is currently supported in part by the KU Leuven C1 Grant ZKD1118 C16/16/005, the National Science Foundation of Belgium (FWO) Grant G.001.12 Odysseus, and by the European Research Council Grant No. ERC-2013-CoG 616732 HoloQosmos. A. S. is funded in part by the Walter Burke Institute for Theoretical Physics at Caltech, by DOE Grant DE-SC0011632, and by the Foundational Questions Institute. | ||||||||||||||||||
Group: | Walter Burke Institute for Theoretical Physics | ||||||||||||||||||
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Subject Keywords: | Quantum gravity; Bekenstein bound; holography; cosmological constant | ||||||||||||||||||
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Issue or Number: | 14 | ||||||||||||||||||
DOI: | 10.1142/S0218271819440061 | ||||||||||||||||||
Record Number: | CaltechAUTHORS:20190709-152651012 | ||||||||||||||||||
Persistent URL: | https://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechAUTHORS:20190709-152651012 | ||||||||||||||||||
Official Citation: | How low can vacuum energy go when your fields are finite-dimensional? ChunJun Cao, Aidan Chatwin-Davies and Ashmeet Singh. International Journal of Modern Physics D 2019 28:14; doi: 10.1142/S0218271819440061 | ||||||||||||||||||
Usage Policy: | No commercial reproduction, distribution, display or performance rights in this work are provided. | ||||||||||||||||||
ID Code: | 97013 | ||||||||||||||||||
Collection: | CaltechAUTHORS | ||||||||||||||||||
Deposited By: | Joy Painter | ||||||||||||||||||
Deposited On: | 09 Jul 2019 22:38 | ||||||||||||||||||
Last Modified: | 16 Nov 2021 17:25 |
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