Quintessential Inflation, Unified Dark Energy and Dark Matter, and Higgs   Mechanism
  We describe a new type of gravity-matter models where gravity couples in a non-conventional way to two distinct scalar fields providing a unified Lagrangian action principle description of: (a) the evolution of both "early" and "late" Universe - by the "inflaton" scalar field; (b) dark energy and dark matter as a unified manifestation of a single material entity - the "darkon" scalar field. The essential non-standard feature of our models is employing the formalism of non-Riemannian space-time volume forms - alternative generally covariant integration measure densities (volume elements) defined in terms of auxiliary antisymmetric tensor gauge fields. Although being (almost) pure-gauge degrees of freedom, the non-Riemannian space-time volume forms trigger a series of important features unavailable in ordinary gravity-matter models. When including in addition interactions with the electro-weak model bosonic sector we obtain a gravity-assisted generation of electro-weak spontaneous gauge symmetry breaking in the post-inflationary "late" Universe, while the Higgs-like scalar remains massless in the "early" Universe. 
Eduardo Guendelman, Emil Nissimov, Svetlana Pacheva
gr-qc hep-th