Quintessence and the Rest of the World: Suppressing Long-Range Interactions
Abstract
A nearly massless, slowly rolling scalar field φ may provide most of the energy density of the current Universe. One potential difficulty with this idea is that couplings to ordinary matter should lead to observable long-range forces and time dependence of the constants of nature. I explore the possibility that an approximate global symmetry serves to suppress such couplings even further. Such a symmetry would allow a coupling of φ to the pseudoscalar FμνF~μν of electromagnetism, which would rotate the polarization state of radiation from distant sources. This effect is fairly well constrained, but it is conceivable that future improvements could lead to a detection of a cosmological scalar field.
- Publication:
-
Physical Review Letters
- Pub Date:
- October 1998
- DOI:
- 10.1103/PhysRevLett.81.3067
- arXiv:
- arXiv:astro-ph/9806099
- Bibcode:
- 1998PhRvL..81.3067C
- Keywords:
-
- Astrophysics;
- General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology;
- High Energy Physics - Phenomenology;
- High Energy Physics - Theory
- E-Print:
- 12 pages