Steven Stroiney with Lawrence Krauss

Axions, Quintessence  and Naturalness

We will explore the issue of naturalness as it relates to one of the prime candidates for “quintessence”… a scalar field in a slowly varying potential that mimics, for some time, a cosmological constant in the Universe.  The field we will examine is a pseudoscalar “axion-like” field whose symmetry breaking scale is at the Planck scale.