Confinement/Deconfinement and Gravity-Assisted Emergent Higgs Mechanism in Quintessential Cosmological Model

TL;DR

This paper presents a cosmological model combining modified gravity, non-Riemannian volume-forms, and gauge fields, leading to dynamic symmetry breaking and confinement phenomena that differ between early and late universe epochs.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach using non-Riemannian volume-forms in extended gravity models to explain inflation, symmetry breaking, and confinement dynamically across cosmic epochs.

Findings

Two flat regions in the inflaton potential correspond to early and late universe.

Dynamical Higgs-like symmetry breaking occurs only in the late universe.

Charge confinement appears in the late universe, with deconfinement in the early universe.

Abstract

Motivated by the ideas of Jacob Bekenstein concerning gravity-assisted symmetry breaking, we consider a non-canonical model of f(R)=R+R^2 extended gravity coupled to neutral scalar "inflaton", as well as to SU(2)xU(1) multiplet of fields matching the content of the bosonic sector of the electroweak particle model, however with the following significant difference - the SU(2)xU(1) iso-doublet Higgs-like scalar enters here with a standard positive mass squared and without quartic selfinteraction. Strong interaction dynamics and, in particular, QCD-like confinement effects are also considered by introducing an additional coupling to a strongly nonlinear gauge field whose Lagrangian contains a square-root of the standard Maxwell/Yang-Mills kinetic term. The latter is known to produce charge confinement in flat spacetime. The principal new ingredient in the present approach is employing the formalism of non-Riemannian spacetime volume-forms - alternative generally covariant volume elements independent of the spacetime metric, constructed in terms of auxiliary antisymmetric tensor gauge fields of maximal rank. Although being almost pure-gauge, i.e. not introducing any additional propagating degrees of freedom, their dynamics triggers a series of physically important features when passing to the Einstein frame: (i) Appearance of two infinitely large flat regions of the effective "inflaton" scalar potential with vastly different energy scales corresponding to the "early" and "late" epochs of the Universe; (ii) Dynamical generation of Higgs-like spontaneous symmetry breaking effective potential for the SU(2)xU(1) iso-doublet scalar in the "late" Universe, and vanishing of the symmetry breaking in the "early" Universe; (iii) Dynamical appearance of charge confinement via the "square-root" nonlinear gauge field in the "late" Universe and deconfinement in the "early" Universe.