Absence of cosmological constant problem in special relativistic field theory of gravity: one-loop renormalization group

Abstract

There exists a nonlinear theory of gravity which is not structurally equivalent to general relativity and that, in the non-interacting limit, describes a free massless particle with helicity ±2. We have recently shown that this theory can be understood as the result of self-coupling, in complete parallelism to the well-known case of general relativity. This special relativistic field theory of gravity exhibits a decoupling of vacuum zero-point energies of matter and passes all the known experimental tests in gravitation. It is explicitly demonstrated that there is no flow of the effective cosmological constant under the action of the renormalization group at one-loop level, while simple symmetry arguments show that this would continue to be true for higher-loop corrections. The important lesson is that just mild local assumptions concerning the nature of the particle mediating the gravitational interactions are enough to motivate theories which are free of the cosmological constant problem.