Can infrared gravitons screen $\Lambda$?

Abstract

It has been suggested that infrared gravitons in de Sitter space may lead to a secular screening of the effective cosmological constant. This seems to clash with the naive expectation that the curvature scalar should stay constant due to the Heisenberg equation of motion. Here, we show that the tadpole correction to the local expansion rate, which has been used in earlier analyses as an indicator of a decaying effective $\Lambda$, is not gauge invariant. On the other hand, we construct a gauge invariant operator which measures the renormalized curvature scalar smeared over an arbitrary window function, and we find that there is no secular screening of this quantity (to any given order in perturbation theory).