Vacuum Energy from an Extra Dimension with UV/IR Connection

Abstract

We propose a lower limit on the size of a single discrete gravitational extra dimension in the context of an effective field theory for massive gravitons. The limit arises in this setup from the requirement that the Casimir energy density of quantum fields is in agreement with the observed dark energy density of the universe. The Casimir energy densities can be exponentially suppressed to an almost arbitrarily small value by the masses of heavy bulk fields, thereby allowing a tiny size of the extra dimension. This suppression is only restricted by the strong coupling scale of the theory, which is known to be related to the compactification scale via an UV/IR connection for local gravitational theory spaces. We thus obtain an upper limit on the compactification scale of the discrete gravitational extra dimension in the range 10^7 GeV...10^12 GeV, while the strong coupling scale is by a factor 10^2 larger than the compactification scale. We also comment on a possible cancelation of the gravitational contribution to the quantum effective potential.