Spintessence! New models for dark matter and dark energy

We investigate a class of models for dark matter and/or negative-pressure, dynamical dark energy consisting of “spintessence”, a complex scalar field φ spinning in a U(1)-symmetric potential V(φ)=V(|φ|). As the Universe expands, the field spirals slowly toward the origin. The internal angular momentum plays an important role in the cosmic evolution and fluctuation dynamics. We outline the constraints on a cosmic spintessence field, describing the properties of the potential necessary to sustain a viable dark energy model, making connections with quintessence and self-interacting and fuzzy cold dark matter. Possible implications for the coincidence problem, baryogenesis, and cosmological birefringence, and generalizations of spintessence to models with higher global symmetry and models in which the symmetry is not exact are also discussed.