Abstract
Motivated by the ideas of Jacob Bekenstein concerning gravity-assisted symmetry breaking, we consider a non-canonical model of f(R) = R + R2 extended gravity coupled to neutral scalar “inflaton”, as well as to SU(2) × U(1) multiplet of fields matching the content of the bosonic sector of the electroweak particle model, however with the following significant difference — the SU(2) × U(1) iso-doublet Higgs-like scalar enters here with a standard positive mass squared and without quartic selfinteraction. Strong interaction dynamics and, in particular, QCD-like confinement effects are also considered by introducing an additional coupling to a strongly nonlinear gauge field whose Lagrangian contains a square-root of the standard Maxwell/Yang–Mills kinetic term. The latter is known to produce charge confinement in flat spacetime. The principal new ingredient in the present approach is employing the formalism of non-Riemannian spacetime volume-forms — alternative generally covariant volume elements independent of the spacetime metric, constructed in terms of auxiliary antisymmetric tensor gauge fields of maximal rank. Although being almost pure-gauge, i.e. not introducing any additional propagating degrees of freedom, their dynamics triggers a series of physically important features when passing to the Einstein frame: (i) Appearance of two infinitely large flat regions of the effective “inflaton” scalar potential with vastly different energy scales corresponding to the “early” and “late” epochs of the Universe; (ii) Dynamical generation of Higgs-like spontaneous symmetry breaking effective potential for the SU(2) × U(1) iso-doublet scalar in the “late” Universe, and vanishing of the symmetry breaking in the “early” Universe; (iii) Dynamical appearance of charge confinement via the “square-root” nonlinear gauge field in the “late” Universe and deconfinement in the “early” Universe.
Original language | English |
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Title of host publication | Jacob Bekenstein |
Subtitle of host publication | The Conservative Revolutionary |
Editors | Lars Brink |
Publisher | World Scientific |
Pages | 259-270 |
Number of pages | 12 |
ISBN (Electronic) | 9789811203978 |
ISBN (Print) | 9789811203954 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Sep 2019 |