Quintessence from Shape Moduli

Abstract

We show that shape moduli in sub-millimeter extra dimensional scenarios, addressing the gauge hierarchy problem, can dominate the energy density of the universe today. In our scenario, the volume of the extra dimensions is stabilized at a sufficiently high scale to avoid conflicts with nucleosynthesis and solar-system precision gravity experiments, while the shape moduli remain light but couple extremely weakly to brane-localized matter and easily avoid these bounds. Nonlocal effects in the bulk of the extra dimension generate a potential for the shape moduli. The potential has the right form and order of magnitude to account for the present day cosmic acceleration, in a way analogous to models of quintessence as a pseudo Nambu-Goldstone boson.