2013/06/13 by Lawrence M. Krauss, James B. Dent
Physics and Astronomy · #Astrophysics #Cosmology #Cosmology and Gravitation Theories #Dark Matter and Cosmic Phenomena #Dark energy #Dark matter #Grand Unified Theory #Higgs boson #Neutrino #Particle physics #Particle physics theoretical and experimental studies #Physics #Seesaw mechanism #Seesaw molecular geometry #Supersymmetry #Theoretical physics #Vacuum expectation value #astro-ph.CO #gr-qc #hep-ph #hep-th
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevlett.111.061802
4 pages, submitted to PRL
arxiv created 2013/06/13 · openalex publication_date 2013/08/07 · arxiv updated 2015/06/16 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
Motivated by the seesaw mechanism for neutrinos which naturally generates small neutrino masses, we explore how a small grand-unified-theory-scale mixing between the standard model Higgs boson and an otherwise massless hidden sector scalar can naturally generate a small mass and vacuum expectation value for the new scalar which produces a false vacuum energy density contribution comparable to that of the observed dark energy dominating the current expansion of the Universe. This provides a simple and natural mechanism for producing the correct scale for dark energy, even if it does not address the long-standing question of why much larger dark energy contributions are not produced from the visible sector. The new scalar produces no discernible signatures in existing terrestrial experiments so that one may have to rely on other cosmological tests of this idea.