Growing neutrinos and cosmological selection
Abstract
The time evolution of a cosmological scalar field can be stopped by an increasing mass of the neutrinos. This leads to a transition from a cosmological scaling solution with dynamical dark energy at early time to a cosmological constant dominated universe at late time. The trigger for the transition is set at the time when the neutrinos become non-relativistic. The characteristic mass scale for dark energy is thus related to the neutrino mass, the only known particle physics scale in its vicinity. This explains the ``why now problem'' for dark energy. We present a particle physics realization of this ``growing matter'' scenario. It is based on the very slowly varying mass of a superheavy scalar triplet field whose expectation value dominates the light neutrino masses.
Cite
@article{arxiv.0706.4427,
title = {Growing neutrinos and cosmological selection},
author = {C. Wetterich},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0706.4427},
year = {2008}
}