Could there be something rather than nothing?

Jul, 1993
13 pages
Published in:
  • Phys.Lett.B 315 (1993) 232-238
e-Print:
Report number:
  • HUTP-93-A020

Citations per year

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Abstract:
There is increasing evidence that the universe may have a small cosmological constant. We suggest a scheme for naturally generating a small cosmological constant. Our idea requires the presence of a discrete accidental symmetry which is spontaneously broken by vacuum expectation values of the fields, and explicitly broken by high dimensional operators in the Lagrangian.
Note:
  • 9 pages, 1 ps figure (included), in TeX, using harvmac; HUTP-93/A020
  • cosmological constant
  • vacuum state
  • symmetry: SO(N)
  • spontaneous symmetry breaking