Asymptotic safety and the cosmological constant

Abstract

Abstract: We study the non-perturbative renormalisation of quantum gravity in four dimensions. Taking care to disentangle physical degrees of freedom, we observe the topological nature of conformal fluctuations arising from the functional measure. The resulting beta functions possess an asymptotically safe fixed point with a global phase structure leading to classical general relativity for positive, negative or vanishing cosmological constant. If only the conformal fluctuations are quantised we find an asymptotically safe fixed point predicting a vanishing cosmological constant on all scales. At this fixed point we reproduce the critical exponent, ν = 1/3, found in numerical lattice studies by Hamber. Returning to the full theory we find that by setting the cosmological constant to zero the critical exponent agrees with the conformally reduced theory. This suggests the fixed point may be physical while hinting at solution to the cosmological constant problem.