Naturalness of exponential cosmon potentials and the cosmological constant problem

Abstract

We discuss the naturalness of exponential potentials for quintessence, showing that the resulting almost flat direction in the space of scalar fields, as well as the small time dependent cosmon mass, can be related to an anomalous dilatation symmetry. We argue that the physics of the cosmological constant is Planck scale physics, and comment on the role of quantum fluctuations. We present three higher dimensional scenarios how a runaway of the ``cosmological constant'' to zero can be combined with stable particle physics properties, leading at most to small variations of the ``fundamental couplings''.

19 pages

References in corpus (5)

• Cosmology and the Fate of Dilatation Symmetry
• Growing neutrinos and cosmological selection
• Einstein and Jordan frames reconciled: a frame-invariant approach to scalar-tensor cosmology
• Primordial nucleosynthesis as a probe of fundamental physics parameters
• Impact of three years of data from the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe on cosmological models with dynamical dark energy

Cited by in corpus (10)

• Scale invariance, unimodular gravity and dark energy
• No fifth force in a scale invariant universe
• Neutrino Lump Fluid in Growing Neutrino Quintessence
• Warping with dilatation symmetry and self-tuning of the cosmological constant
• Chameleonic dilaton and conformal transformations
• Species, chameleonic strings and the concept of particle
• Constraints for warped branes
• Non-linear Cosmological Perturbations for Coupled Dark Energy
• Scale Invariance as a Solution to the Cosmological Constant Problem
• The expansion of the universe observed with supernovae