Environmental cosmic acceleration from a phase transition in the dark sector

A new degravitation mechanism within the framework of scalar tensor gravity is proposed. The mechanism eliminates all constant contributions from the potential to the Friedmann equation, leaving only the kinematic and the dynamic terms of the potential to drive cosmic acceleration. We explore a scenario involving a density-triggered phase transition in the late-time universe, and argue that the resulting effective energy density and equation of state parameter can explain late-time cosmology when extrapolated to a region of the parameter space.