Higgs–Gravity Cosmology: Addition: Dark Matter

We propose a Higgs–gravity cosmology (Semple 2025) in which dark matter and dark energy are emergent phenomena arising from the non-minimal coupling of the Higgs field to curvature. This coupling modifies Einstein’s equations through an effective Newton’s constant and destabilizes event horizons in the Higgs-dominated plasma epoch. Overdensities that approach but fail to form stable horizons generate entropy, which stabilizes the surrounding spacetime and leaves behind diffuse, non-radiating clumps — “horizon-failure halos.” These halos behave as dark matter, while cumulative entropy growth from primordial and supermassive black holes drives cosmic acceleration, eliminating the need for a cosmological constant.

Small-scale halos are suppressed by an entropy-modified Jeans criterion, preventing collapse below ~10¹⁰ M☉ in the first 380 Myr. As a result, the first stars form only within larger stabilized halos, with reionization delayed until ~500 Myr–1 Gyr. This mechanism resolves the missing satellites, cusp–core, and too-big-to-fail problems, while naturally biasing collapse toward massive primordial black holes that seed early supermassive black holes observed by JWST.

The framework makes falsifiable predictions: percent-level anomalies in BAO residuals (Euclid/DESI), non-thermal relic neutrino spectra (PTOLEMY, IceCube), ultra-energetic FRBs tied to late halo collapse (CHIME/SKA), and lensing-only halos detectable by SKA and CMB-S4. Crucially, the model introduces no new fields beyond the Higgs boson, remains consistent with general relativity at large scales, and provides a unified alternative to ΛCDM and inflationary cosmology.