| Abstract: The near vanishing of the cosmological constant is one of the most puzzling open problems in theoretical physics. I will talk about a system, the so-called framid, that features a technically similar problem. Its stress-energy tensor has a Lorentz-invariant expectation value on the ground state, yet there are no standard, symmetry-based selection rules enforcing this, since the ground state spontaneously breaks boosts. I will verify the Lorentz invariance of the expectation value in question with explicit one-loop computations. These, however, yield the expected result only thanks to highly nontrivial cancellations, which are quite mysterious from the low-energy effective theory viewpoint. |