Growing neutrinos and cosmological selection

TL;DR

This paper proposes a cosmological model where neutrino mass growth triggers a transition from dark energy dominance to a cosmological constant, linking neutrino physics to the timing of cosmic acceleration.

Contribution

It introduces a particle physics realization of the growing matter scenario, connecting neutrino mass evolution with dark energy dynamics.

Findings

Neutrino mass increase can halt scalar field evolution, causing late-time cosmic acceleration.

The model naturally explains the coincidence problem of dark energy.

A superheavy scalar triplet field's expectation value influences neutrino masses.

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.