An attempt to explain the smallness of the cosmological constant

Abstract

Fields which couple directly to the cosmological constant (Λ) may provide a scenario for explaining the smallness of Λ at the present epoch. In this paper we postulate the existence of a scalar field which couples universally to the trace of energy - momentum tensor of matter. Various possibilities for the explicit form of the coupling function are considered. The field equations in such a theory are derived, and the cosmological models with such a scalar field are analyzed. The proposed coupling makes the effective cosmological constant a dynamically evolving quantity, which can be driven to zero by allowing the scalar field to grow to sufficiently large values. For the case of linear coupling, however, it does not seem to be possible to attain sufficient growth during the age of the universe (∼10¹⁷s). A quadratic coupling to the trace can evolve Λ to a value consistent with today's observations, but the universe is dominated by the scalar field, rather than by radiation, at late times. The evolution is singular for couplings through a higher power law, in that the scalar field blows up at a finite time. The model is not very sensitive to initial conditions and the problems encountered can be avoided only by a severe fine-tuning of the parameters in the basic theory.