Hybrid dark sector: locked quintessence and dark matter

Abstract

We present a unified model of dark matter and dark energy. The dark matter field is amodulus corresponding to a flat direction of supersymmetry, which couples, in a hybridtype potential, with the dark energy field. The latter is a light scalar, whose direction isstabilized by non-renormalizable terms. This quintessence field is kept ‘locked’ on top of afalse vacuum due to the coupling with the oscillating dark matter field. It is shown that themodel can satisfy the observations when we consider low-scale gauge-mediatedsupersymmetry breaking. The necessary initial conditions are naturally attained by theaction of supergravity corrections on the potential, in the period following the end ofprimordial inflation.