Lorentz invariance, vacuum energy, and cosmology

Abstract

This contribution reviews recent work on a new approach to the cosmological constant problem, which starts from the macroscopic behavior of a conserved relativistic microscopic variable q. First, the statics of the vacuum energy density is discussed and, then, the dynamics in a cosmological context.

Comments: Parallel talk at ICHEP08, Philadelphia, USA, July 2008. 6 pages, LaTeX, 2 eps figures. v4: minor polishing