Cosmology with Ultra-light Pseudo-Nambu-Goldstone Bosons

We explore the cosmological implications of an ultra-light pseudo-Nambu-Goldstone boson. With global spontaneous symmetry breaking scale $f \simeq 10^{18}$ GeV and explicit breaking scale comparable to MSW neutrino masses, $M \sim 10^{-3}$ eV, such a field, which acquires a mass $m_\phi \sim M^2/f \sim H_0$, would have become dynamical at recent epochs and currently dominate the energy density of the universe. The field acts as an effective cosmological constant for several expansion times and then relaxes into a condensate of coherent non-relativistic bosons. Such a model can reconcile dynamical estimates of the density parameter, $\Omega_m \sim 0.2$, with a spatially flat universe, and can yield an expansion age $H_0 t_0 \simeq 1$ while remaining consistent with limits from gravitational lens statistics.Comment: 15 pages (including 2 figs.), uuencoded compressed postscript; also available on www at http://www-astro-theory.fnal.gov/ under Publication