Inflation and late time acceleration designed by Stueckelberg massive photon

TL;DR

This paper reviews the Stueckelberg mechanism for giving photons a small mass, explores its implications for cosmology, and proposes a model where such a massive photon influences the universe's late-time acceleration.

Contribution

It introduces a cosmological model with non-minimally coupled Stueckelberg fields that can produce multiple acceleration phases in the universe's expansion.

Findings

Photon mass bounds are tighter at higher scales.

The model predicts a decelerating phase between two accelerated phases.

Possible anisotropic extensions of the cosmological model.

Abstract

We present a mini review of the Stueckelberg mechanism, which was proposed to make the abelian gauge theories massive as an alternative to Higgs mechanism, within the framework of Minkowski as well as curved spacetimes. The higher the scale the tighter the bounds on the photon mass, which might be gained via the Stueckelberg mechanism, may be signalling that even an extremely small mass of the photon which cannot be measured directly could have far reaching effects in cosmology. We present a cosmological model where Stueckelberg fields, which consist of both scalar and vector fields, are non-minimally coupled to gravity and the universe could go through a decelerating expansion phase sandwiched by two different accelerated expansion phases. We discuss also the possible anisotropic extensions of the model.