  A mechanism for suppressing the cosmological constant is described, using a
superconducting analogy in which fermions coupled to gravitons are in an
unstable false vauum. The coupling of the fermions to gravitons and a screened
attractive interaction among pairs of fermions generates fermion condensates
with zero momentum and a phase transition induces a non-perturbative transition
to a true vacuum state. This produces a positive energy gap $\Delta$ in the
vacuum energy identified with $\sqrt{\Lambda}$, where $\Lambda$ is the
cosmological constant. In the strong coupling limit, a large cosmological
constant induces a period of inflation in the early universe, followed by a
weak coupling limit in which $\sqrt{\Lambda}$ vanishes exponentially fast as
the universe expands due to the dependence of the energy gap on the Fermi
surface fermions, predicting a small cosmological constant in the early
universe.
