Emergent Dark Energy from Spontaneous Alignment of a Timelike Vector Field
- Publicado
- Servidor
- Preprints.org
- DOI
- 10.20944/preprints202507.0462.v1
We investigate a geometric mechanism for dark energy arising from the spontaneous align- ment of a unit-norm, future-directed timelike vector field Φμ(x), which dynamically selects a preferred temporal foliation of spacetime. In this framework, known as Chronon Field Theory, misaligned regions in the early universe give rise to metastable domain walls whose residual topological stress acts as a slowly redshifting vacuum energy component. We derive the mod- ified cosmological dynamics induced by these structures and show, through both analytic and numerical analysis, that they can drive late-time cosmic acceleration with an effective equation of state w ≈ −2/3, in agreement with prior estimates for frustrated domain wall networks. This model provides a minimal, covariant, and background-independent account of dark energy, without invoking a fine-tuned cosmological constant or new scalar degrees of freedom.