Quintessence, Neutrino Masses and Unification of the Dark Sector

TL;DR

This paper explores a unified model where the quintessence field responsible for dark energy also generates neutrino masses and dark matter candidates through Yukawa couplings and Majorana terms.

Contribution

It introduces a novel framework linking dark energy, neutrino masses, and dark matter by coupling the quintessence field to neutrinos and incorporating Majorana terms.

Findings

The model can lock neutrino masses at ~0.01 eV consistent with cosmological data.

The quintessence field generates masses for active and sterile neutrinos.

Sterile neutrinos emerge as natural dark matter candidates.

Abstract

The origin of the neutrino mass, dark matter (DM), and dark energy (DE) are among the most challenging problems of fundamental physics. We address these questions from analyses of the models where the neutrino mass is generated via Yukawa coupling to the quintessence field which represents the DE. It has been shown in a recent work on the toy model with a single Dirac fermion coupled to the quintessence that by choosing parameters of the DE potential to match the present DE density, the model allows to lock the neutrino mass at m ~0.01 eV and yields consistent estimates for other parameters of the Universe. To include the DM component into this framework we propose here to add the right-handed Majorana term(s) into Lagrangian with the quintessence-generated mass. As a results, the DE field is responsible for generation of the masses of the light active Majorana neutrinos as well as of the heavy sterile neutrinos. The latter are natural DM candidates.