Cosmological Dark Energy Condensate (CosmoDEC): A unified description of the Dark Universe

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A staggering amount of observational evidence, ranging from the study of the distribution of matter at large scales to galactic rotation curves, suggests the existence of an exotic form of matter. This alleged new component, which accounts for around a quarter of the energy content of our universe, is usually referred to as dark matter. The existence of this dark sector was also strongly supported by the fact that the sole gravitational interaction sourced by ordinary visible matter largely fails to account for structure formation in the early universe. Furthermore, redshift measurements of Type Ia Supernovae have shown that the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate, hence supporting the need for an additional dark energy component in the present-day observable universe. Thus, our current understanding of fundamental physics, encoded in the Standard Model of Particle Physics and the theory of General Relativity (GR), seems to suggest that we can only account for roughly 5% of the matter content of the cosmos, while the rest of it remains almost uncharted territory. The corpuscular theory of gravity offers a way to describe gravity in the strong coupling regime according to which GR completes itself in the UV through the process of classicalization. This pictures allows one to conceive the current cosmic expansion as driven by a ''cosmological condensate'' of gravitons. Besides, if one adds some ''baryonic impurities'' (galaxies and clusters) to this ''cosmological condensate'', then Milgrom's Modified Newtonian Dynamics (MOND) naturally emerges, in the corpuscular framework, as the response of the condensate to the local presence of ordinary matter. The scope of the proposed research is to build on these premises by combining the general wisdom of effective field theories of gravity, focusing on its ultra-violet (UV) self-completion, and the idea that that the two dark components can interact and source one another.