Dark energy from primordial inflationary quantum fluctuations

TL;DR

This paper proposes that dark energy arises from quantum fluctuations of an almost massless scalar field during primordial inflation, linking current cosmic acceleration to early universe physics at the electroweak scale.

Contribution

It introduces a model where dark energy results from inflationary quantum fluctuations of a nearly massless scalar field, connecting late-time acceleration to primordial inflation at TeV energies.

Findings

Primordial inflation energy scale around a few TeV.

Dark energy dominated universe only recently.

Inflation lasted for an extremely long period.

Abstract

We show that current cosmic acceleration can be explained by an almost massless scalar field experiencing quantum fluctuations during primordial inflation. Provided its mass does not exceed the Hubble parameter today, this field has been frozen during the cosmological ages to start dominating the universe only recently. By using supernovae data, completed with baryonic acoustic oscillations from galaxy surveys and cosmic microwave background anisotropies, we infer the energy scale of primordial inflation to be around a few TeV, which implies a negligible tensor-to-scalar ratio of the primordial fluctuations. Moreover, our model suggests that inflation lasted for an extremely long period. Dark energy could therefore be a natural consequence of cosmic inflation close to the electroweak energy scale.