Gauged quintessence

Abstract

Despite its dominance in the present universe's energy budget, dark energy is the least understood component in the universe. Although there is a popular model for the dynamical dark energy, the quintessence scalar, the investigation is limited because of its highly elusive character. We present a model where the quintessence is gauged by an Abelian gauge symmetry. The quintessence is promoted to be a complex scalar whose real part is the dark energy field while the imaginary part is the longitudinal component of a new gauge boson. It brings interesting characters to dark energy physics. We study the general features of the model, including how the quintessence behavior is affected and how the solicited dark energy properties constrain its gauge interaction. We also note that while the uncoupled quintessence models are suffered greatly from the Hubble tension, it can be alleviated if the quintessence is under the gauge symmetry.