The problem of the cosmological constant

The cosmological term is necessarily vanishing in a conformal gravitational theory, and the sum of the induced cosmological constants of all the broken gauge symmetries cancels the curvature of the background spacetime. Thus the sum of all the cosmological constants is vanishing when the background spacetime is Minkowskian. Furthermore, the spontaneous breaking of a gauge symmetry through the Higgs mechanism is always accompanied by a phase transition of the background spacetime