Lily Schrempp
ITP, University of Heidelberg

Abstract
Growing neutrino quintessence provides an explanation to the coincidence problem for dark energy by an increasing cosmological value of the neutrino mass. It is generated from an interaction between a quintessence scalar field and neutrinos which is much stronger than gravity. The fifth force between neutrinos, mediated by the scalar field, induces the formation of large scale neutrino structures in a recent cosmological epoch. We argue that within sufficiently dense and large structures, the non-linearities in the field equations stop the further increase of the neutrino mass with time. In addition, we find the neutrino induced gravitational potential to be substantially reduced compared to linear extrapolations. We furthermore demonstrate that our findings may reconcile claimed cosmological observations of a time variation of the fine structure constant with geophysical bounds.

15 December 2010, 13:30

Centro de Astrofísica
Rua das Estrelas
4150-762 Porto