Manifestly Local Formulation of Nonlocal Approach to the Cosmological Constant Problem

Abstract

We present a manifestly local and general coordinate invariant formulation of a nonlocal approach to the cosmological constant problem which has been recently proposed by Carroll and Remmen. To do that, we need to introduce a topological term involving a new 3-form gauge field. The equations of motion for this new 3-form gauge field lead to a constant Lagrange multiplier parameter and the resulting action becomes equivalent to that of Carroll and Remmen. In our formulation, nonlocal informations are encoded via the procedure of taking the space-time average at the stage of the equations of motion. Consequently, our theory evades a no-go theorem by Weinberg and provides a new solution to the cosmological constant problem in almost exactly the same way as the original proposal by Carroll et al.