Growing neutrinos and cosmological selection

The time evolution of a cosmological scalar field can be stopped by an increasing mass of the neutrinos. This leads to a transition from a cosmological scaling solution with dynamical dark energy at early time to a cosmological constant dominated universe at late time. The trigger for the transition is set at the time when the neutrinos become non-relativistic. The characteristic mass scale for dark energy is thus related to the neutrino mass, the only known particle physics scale in its vicinity. This explains the "why now problem" for dark energy. We present a particle physics realization of this "growing matter" scenario. It is based on the very slowly varying mass of a superheavy scalar triplet field whose expectation value dominates the light neutrino masses. (C) 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.