A Possible Connection Between Massive Fermions and Dark Energy

In a dense cloud of massive fermions interacting by exchange of a light scalar field, the effective mass of the fermion can become negligibly small. As the cloud expands, the effective mass and the total energy density eventually increase with decreasing density. In this regime, the pressure-density relation can approximate that required for dark energy. We apply this phenomenon to the expansion of the Universe with a very light scalar field and infer relations between the parameters available and cosmological observations. Majorana neutrinos at a mass that may have been recently determined, and fermions such as the Lightest Supersymmetric Particle (LSP) may both be consistent with current observations of dark energy.
Comment: 15 pages, 8 figures, to appear in Proceedings of the Seventh International Heidelberg Conference on Dark Matter in Astro and Particle Physics, DARK'09