Effective action, massive gravitons and the Cosmological Constant

Abstract

The one loop effective action in a Schwarzschild background is here used to compute the cosmological constant in presence of massive gravitons. It is shown that the expression of the Zero Point Energy (ZPE) is equivalent to the one computed by means of a variational approach. To handle with ZPE divergences, we use the zeta function regularization. The regularization is closely related to the subtraction procedure appearing in the computation of Casimir energy in a curved background. A renormalization procedure is introduced to remove the infinities together with a renormalization group equation.