Mass varying neutrinos, symmetry breaking, and cosmic acceleration

Abstract

We introduce a new proposal for the onset of cosmic acceleration based on mass-varying neutrinos. When massive neutrinos become nonrelativistic, the $Z_2$ symmetry breaks, and the quintessence potential becomes positive from its initially zero value. This positive potential behaves like a cosmological constant at the present era and drives the Universe's acceleration during the slow roll evolution of the quintessence. In contrast to $\Lambda$CDM model, the dark energy in our model is dynamical, and the acceleration is not persistent. Contrary to some of the previous models of dark energy with mass-varying neutrinos, we do not use the adiabaticity condition which leads to instability.