Modified Gravity and Inflaton Assisted Dynamical Generation of Charge Confinement and Electroweak Symmetry Breaking in Cosmology

Abstract

We describe a new type of gravity-matter models where modified f(R)=R+R^2 gravity couples non-canonically to a scalar "inflaton", to the bosonic sector of the electroweak particle model and to a special nonlinear gauge field with a square-root of the standard Maxwell/Yang-Mills kinetic term simulating QCD confining dynamics. Our construction is based on the powerful formalism of non-Riemannian space-time volume-forms - alternative metric-independent volume elements defined in terms of auxiliary antisymmetric tensor gauge fields. Our model provides a unified Lagrangian action principle description of: (i) the evolution of both "early" and "late" universe by the "inflaton" scalar field; (ii) gravity-inflaton-assisted dynamical generation of Higgs spontaneous breakdown of electroweak gauge symmetry in the "late" universe, as well as dynamical suppression of electroweak breakdown in the "early" universe; (iii) gravity-inflaton-assisted dynamical generation of QCD-like confinement in the "late" universe and suppression of confinement in the "early" universe due to the special interplay with the dynamics of the QCD-simulating nonlinear gauge field.