paper

Cosmological Stasis from Field-Dependent Decay

arXiv:2502.20449 · doi:10.1007/JHEP09(2025)072

Abstract

Cosmological stasis is a new type of epoch in the cosmological timeline during which the cosmological abundances of different energy components -- such as vacuum energy, matter, and radiation -- remain constant despite the expansion of the universe. Previous studies have shown that stasis naturally arises in various scenarios beyond the Standard Model, either through sequential decays of states in large towers or via the annihilation of a single particle species in thermal equilibrium with itself. In this work, we demonstrate that stasis can also emerge from the decay of a single particle species whose decay width is dynamically regulated by a scalar field rolling down a Hubble-mass potential. By analyzing the fixed points of the dynamical system, we identify regions of the parameter space where stasis occurs as a global attractor of cosmic evolution. We also find that, depending on the specific abundance configuration, stasis solutions can manifest as either a stable node with asymptotic behavior or a stable spiral exhibiting intrinsic oscillations. Furthermore, we present an explicit model for this realization of stasis and explore its phenomenological constraints and implications.

35 pages, 7 figures, to match the published version

References in corpus (20)