Mass Varying Neutrinos, Quintessence, and the Accelerating Expansion of the Universe

Understand

We analyze the Mass Varying Neutrino (MaVaN) scenario.

• We consider a minimal model of massless Dirac fermions coupled to a scalar field, mainly in the framework of finite temperature quantum field theory.
• We demonstrate that the mass equation we find has non-trivial solutions only for special classes of potentials, and only within certain temperature intervals.
• We give most of our results for the Ratra-Peebles Dark Energy (DE) potential.