The cosmological constant and dimensional reduction

Abstract

A brief history of the cosmological constant is given and its role in present day theories is discussed along with an indication of why it is a problem in physics today. A discussion of the papers by Visser and Squires on the use of the cosmological constant for dimensional reduction is given and in the case of Squires' paper, an exact treatment of the bound states problem is given in 3-dimensions and some headway is made in the more general N-dimensional case. Some preliminary work on the nonlocallity problem is also presented along with a brief discussion on the concept of nonlocallity. In conjunction with this work a computer program, written in the computer language REDUCE, was developed to work out curvature components and associated variables.