Dark energy as a remnant of inflation and electroweak symmetry breaking

Abstract

It is shown that dark energy can be obtained from the interplay of the Higgs boson and the inflaton. A key element is the realization that electroweak symmetry breaking can trigger a second phase of rolling of the inflaton, which, when provided with the appropriate couplings between the fields, can be sufficiently slow to source accelerated expansion in the late time Universe. The observed dark energy density is obtained without fine-tuning of parameters or initial conditions due to an intricate conspiracy of numbers related to inflation, gravity and electroweak physics.

10 pages, 3 figures. v2: several improvements and updated references. v3: minor improvements, accepted for publication in JHEP

References in corpus (4)

• Cosmology and the Fate of Dilatation Symmetry
• On the Cosmological Implications of the String Swampland
• De Sitter Space and the Swampland
• Fifth forces, Higgs portals and broken scale invariance

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• Screening the Higgs portal
• Two models unifying warm inflation with dark matter and dark energy
• Dark energy without fine tuning