A microscopic model for an emergent cosmological constant

Abstract

The value of the cosmological constant is explained in terms of a noisy diffusion of energy from the low energy particle physics degrees of freedom to the fundamental Planckian granularity which is expected from general arguments in quantum gravity. The quantitative success of our phenomenological model is encouraging and provides possibly useful insights about physics at the scale of quantum gravity.

Comments: Essay written for the Gravity Research Foundation 2018 Awards for Essays on Gravitation. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1711.05183