Dimopoulos, Konstantinos and Markkanen, Tommi (2019) Dark energy as a remnant of inflation and electroweak symmetry breaking. Journal of High Energy Physics, 2019: 29. ISSN 1029-8479
JHEP2019.pdf - Published Version
Available under License Creative Commons Attribution.
Download (377kB)
Abstract
It is shown that dark energy can be obtained from the interplay of the Higgs boson and the inflaton. A key element is the realization that electroweak symmetry breaking can trigger a second phase of rolling of the inflaton, which, when provided with the appropriate couplings between the fields, can be sufficiently slow to source accelerated expansion in the late time Universe. The observed dark energy density is obtained without fine-tuning of parameters or initial conditions due to an intricate conspiracy of numbers related to inflation, gravity and electroweak physics.