Eddington's gravity in immersed spacetime

We formulate Eddington's affine gravity in a spacetime that is immersed in a larger eight-dimensional space endowed with a hypercomplex structure. The dynamical equation of the first immersed Ricci-type tensor leads to gravitational field equations which include matter. We also study the dynamical effects of the second Ricci-type tensor when added to the Lagrangian density. A simple Lagrangian density constructed from a combination of the standard Ricci tensor and a new tensor field that appears due to the immersion, leads to gravitational equations in which the vacuum energy gravitates with a different cosmological strength as in Demir (2014 Phys. Rev. D 90 064017), rather than with Newton's constant. As a result, the tiny observed curvature is reproduced due to large hierarchies rather than fine tuning.