TY - EJOUR AU - Ben-Dayan, Ido AU - Richter, Robert AU - Ruehle, Fabian AU - Westphal, Alexander TI - Vacuum energy sequestering and conformal symmetry IS - DESY-15-119 M1 - PUBDB-2015-02692 M1 - DESY-15-119 M1 - ZMP-HH-15-20 M1 - arXiv:1507.04158 PY - 2015 AB - 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 Λ and a scaling parameter λ 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 λ plays the role of the dilaton. A vanishing or a small cosmological constant is thus a consequence of the underlying conformal field theory structure. LB - PUB:(DE-HGF)25 ; PUB:(DE-HGF)29 UR - https://bib-pubdb1.desy.de/record/221505 ER -