A way to get rid of cosmological constant and zero point energy problems of quantum fields through metric reversal symmetry

Abstract

In this paper a framework is introduced to remove the huge discrepancy between the empirical value of the cosmological constant and the contribution to the cosmological constant predicted from the vacuum energy of quantum fields. An extra dimensional space with metric reversal symmetry and $R^2$ gravity is considered to this end. The resulting 4-dimensional energy-momentum tensor (obtained after integration over extra dimensions) consists of terms that contain off-diagonally coupled pair of Kaluza-Klein modes. This, in turn, generically results in vanishing of the vacuum expectation value of the energy-momentum tensor for quantum fields, and offers a way to solve the problem of huge contribution of quantum fields to the vacuum energy density.