Abstract

We explore the cosmological implications of an ultralight pseudo Nambu-Goldstone boson. With global spontaneous symmetry breaking scale $f\ensuremath{\simeq}{10}^{18}\mathrm{GeV}$ and explicit breaking scale comparable to Mikheyev-Smirnov-Wolfenstein neutrino masses, $M\ensuremath{\sim}{10}^{\ensuremath{-}3}\mathrm{eV}$, such a field, which acquires a mass ${m}_{\ensuremath{\varphi}}\ensuremath{\sim}{M}^{2}/f\ensuremath{\sim}{H}_{0}$, would currently dominate the energy density of the Universe. The field acts as an effective cosmological constant before relaxing into a condensate of nonrelativistic bosons. Such a model can reconcile dynamical estimates of the density parameter, ${\ensuremath{\Omega}}_{m}\ensuremath{\sim}0.2$, with a spatially flat universe, yielding ${H}_{0}{t}_{0}\ensuremath{\simeq}1$ consistent with limits from gravitational lens statistics.