Wheeler-DeWitt Quantization of Gravity Models of Unified Dark Energy and Dark Matter

TL;DR

This paper develops a novel gravity model using non-Riemannian volume forms to unify dark energy and dark matter, and performs Wheeler-DeWitt quantization revealing singularity avoidance and a dynamic cosmological evolution.

Contribution

It introduces a new gravity-matter framework with non-Riemannian measures that unifies dark components and incorporates quantum cosmology analysis.

Findings

Unified description of dark energy and dark matter via scalar fields.

Dynamical generation of electroweak symmetry breaking in late universe.

Absence of cosmological singularities in the quantized model.

Abstract

First, we describe the construction of a new type of gravity-matter models based on the formalism of non-Riemannian space-time volume forms - alternative generally covariant integration measure densities (volume elements) defined in terms of auxiliary antisymmetric tensor gauge fields. Here gravity couples in a non-conventional way to two distinct scalar fields providing a unified Lagrangian action principle description of: (i) the evolution of both "early" and "late" Universe - by the "inflaton" scalar field; (ii) dark energy and dark matter as a unified manifestation of a single material entity - the "darkon" scalar field. A physically very interesting phenomenon occurs when including in addition interactions with the electro-weak model bosonic sector - we obtain a gravity-assisted dynamical generation of electro-weak spontaneous gauge symmetry breaking in the post-inflationary "late" Universe, while the Higgs-like scalar remains massless in the "early" Universe. Next, we proceed to the Wheeler-DeWitt minisuperspace quantization of the above models. The "darkon" field plays here the role of cosmological "time". In particular, we show the absence of cosmological space-time singularities.