Growing neutrinos and cosmological selection

by Christof Wetterich (Heidelberg Univ.)

Thursday 9 Aug 2007, 14:00 → 15:00 Europe/Zurich

TH Theory Conference Room (CERN)

The time evolution of a cosmological scalar field can be stopped by an increasing mass of the neutrinos. This leads to a transition from a cosmological scaling solution with dynamical dark energy at early time to a cosmological constant dominated universe at late time. The trigger for the transition is set at the time when the neutrinos become non-relativistic. This is a possible solution of the "why now" problem. We present a particle physics realization of this "growing matter" scenario. It is based on the very slowly varying mass of a superheavy scalar triplet field whose expectation value dominates the light neutrino masses. A simple and realistic dark energy cosmology can be obtained in this way.