Cosmic Acceleration and the Sterile Neutrino Field

by Dr Stephon Alexander (Dartmouth College)

Wednesday 14 Aug 2013, 11:30 → 12:30 Europe/Zurich

TH Common Room (CERN)

We propose a new mechanism for cosmic acceleration which naturally solves the coincidence problem, which relates the scale of dark matter to dark energy. In this model a dark U(1) gauge field interacts via. a one-loop correction to the charge of a light sterile neutrino in an expanding background. The interaction energy dominates at late time and gives the correct magnitude in the acceleration rate in the current epoch. We discuss prospects for connecting and constraining this model in collider experiments and potential embeddings into the minimal neutrino standard model.