Quintessence and the Rest of the World

Abstract

A nearly-massless, slowly-rolling scalar field $\phi$ may provide most of the energy density of the current universe. One potential difficulty with this idea is that couplings to ordinary matter, even if suppressed by the Planck scale, should lead to observable long-range forces and time dependence of the constants of nature. I explore the possibility that an approximate global symmetry serves to suppress such couplings even further. Such a symmetry would allow a coupling of $\phi$ to the pseudoscalar $F_{\mu\nu}\widetilde F^{\mu\nu}$ of electromagnetism, which would rotate the polarization state of radiation from distant sources. This effect is fairly well constrained, but it is conceivable that future improvements could lead to a detection of a cosmological scalar field.