Confinement/Deconfinement and Gravity-Assisted Emergent Higgs Mechanism in Quintessential Cosmological Model

Abstract

Motivated by the ideas of Jacob Bekenstein concerning gravity-assisted symmetry breaking, we consider a non-canonical model of f(R)=R+R^2 extended gravity coupled to neutral scalar inflaton, as well as to SU(2)xU(1) multiplet of fields matching the content of the bosonic sector of the electroweak particle model, however with the following significant difference - the SU(2)xU(1) iso-doublet Higgs-like scalar enters here with a standard positive mass squared and without quartic selfinteraction. Strong interaction dynamics and, in particular, QCD-like confinement effects are also considered by introducing an additional coupling to a strongly nonlinear gauge field whose Lagrangian contains a of the standard Maxwell/Yang-Mills kinetic term. The latter is known to produce charge confinement in flat spacetime. The principal new ingredient in the present approach is employing the formalism of non-Riemannian spacetime volume-forms - alternative generally covariant volume elements independent of the spacetime metric, constructed in terms of auxiliary antisymmetric tensor gauge fields of maximal rank. Although being almost pure-gauge, i.e. not introducing any additional propagating degrees of freedom, their dynamics triggers a series of physically important features when passing to the Einstein frame: (i) Appearance of two infinitely large flat regions of the effective inflaton scalar potential with vastly different energy scales corresponding to the early and late epochs of the Universe; (ii) Dynamical generation of Higgs-like spontaneous symmetry breaking effective potential for the SU(2)xU(1) iso-doublet scalar in the late Universe, and vanishing of the symmetry breaking in the early Universe; (iii) Dynamical appearance of charge confinement via the square-root nonlinear gauge field in the late Universe and deconfinement in the early Universe.