Cosmological constant from quarks and torsion

Abstract

We present a simple and natural way to derive the observed small, positive cosmological constant from the gravitational interaction of condensing fermions. In the Riemann-Cartan spacetime, torsion gives rise to the axial-axial four-fermion interaction term in the Dirac Lagrangian for spinor fields. We show that this nonlinear term acts like a cosmological constant if these fields have a nonzero vacuum expectation value. For quark fields in QCD, such a torsion-induced cosmological constant is positive and its energy scale is only about 8 times larger than the observed value. Adding leptons to this picture could lower this scale to the observed value.

Comments: 4 pages; published version