Dark energy as a remnant of inflation and electroweak symmetry breaking

Understand

It is shown that dark energy can be obtained from the interplay of the Higgs boson and the inflaton.

• A key element is the realization that electroweak symmetry breaking can trigger a second phase of rolling of the inflaton, which, when provided with the appropriate couplings between the fields, can be sufficiently slow to source accelerated expansion in the late time Universe.
• The observed dark energy density is obtained without fine-tuning of parameters or initial conditions due to an intricate conspiracy of numbers related to inflation, gravity and electroweak physics.