Cosmological constant from quarks and torsion

We present a simple and natural way to derive the observed small, positive cosmological constant from the gravitational interaction of condensing fermions. In the Riemann‐Cartan spacetime, torsion gives rise to the axial–axial vector four‐fermion interaction term in the Dirac Lagrangian for spinor fields. We show that this nonlinear term acts like a cosmological constant if these fields have a nonzero vacuum expectation value. For quark fields in QCD, such a torsion‐induced cosmological constant is positive and its energy scale is only about 8 times larger than the observed value. Adding leptons to this picture could lower this scale to the observed value.