Emergent Planck mass and dark energy from affine gravity

Abstract

We introduce a novel model of affine gravity, which implements the no-scale scenario. Namely, Planck mass and Hubble constant emerge dynamically, through the mechanism of spontaneous breaking of scale-invariance. Moreover, in our model the time direction and non--degenerate metric emerge dynamically as well. This naturally gives rise to the inflation and may server as a starting point for the "birth" of the Universe. We show that our model is phenomenologically viable, both from the perspective of the direct tests of gravity and cosmological evolution.