Spacetime topology, temperature and the vanishing of vacuum energies in dimensionally reduced supersymmetric theories

Abstract

In dimensionally reduced field theories the large vacuum energies (interpreted as the cosmological constant) can appear when taking quantum effects into account. In a cosmological context one may achieve the vanishing of such vacuum energies in the framework of both Friedmann cosmology and the inflationary universe scenario. This vanishing will essentially depend on the topological properties of physical 4-dimensional spacetime and also on the topology of the (4 + q)-dimensional spacetime under reduction (q is a natural number). The possibility of such a vanishing is considered using the example of supersymmetric Wess-Zumino and N = 1 Yang-Mills models at finite temperature in manifolds with topologies Mr × (S1)q, where the physical 4-dimensional spacetime Mr possesses either the topology of flat homogeneous Clifford-Klein spacetimes, i.e., Mr = R4 − r × (S1)r, r = 1, 2, 3 or M0 = R4 is the Minkowski spacetime.