  Motivated by the ideas of Jacob Bekenstein concerning gravity-assisted
symmetry breaking, we consider a non-canonical model of f(R)=R+R^2 extended
gravity coupled to neutral scalar "inflaton", as well as to SU(2)xU(1)
multiplet of fields matching the content of the bosonic sector of the
electroweak particle model, however with the following significant difference -
the SU(2)xU(1) iso-doublet Higgs-like scalar enters here with a standard
positive mass squared and without quartic selfinteraction. Strong interaction
dynamics and, in particular, QCD-like confinement effects are also considered
by introducing an additional coupling to a strongly nonlinear gauge field whose
Lagrangian contains a square-root of the standard Maxwell/Yang-Mills kinetic
term. The latter is known to produce charge confinement in flat spacetime. The
principal new ingredient in the present approach is employing the formalism of
non-Riemannian spacetime volume-forms - alternative generally covariant volume
elements independent of the spacetime metric, constructed in terms of auxiliary
antisymmetric tensor gauge fields of maximal rank. Although being almost
pure-gauge, i.e. not introducing any additional propagating degrees of freedom,
their dynamics triggers a series of physically important features when passing
to the Einstein frame: (i) Appearance of two infinitely large flat regions of
the effective "inflaton" scalar potential with vastly different energy scales
corresponding to the "early" and "late" epochs of the Universe; (ii) Dynamical
generation of Higgs-like spontaneous symmetry breaking effective potential for
the SU(2)xU(1) iso-doublet scalar in the "late" Universe, and vanishing of the
symmetry breaking in the "early" Universe; (iii) Dynamical appearance of charge
confinement via the "square-root" nonlinear gauge field in the "late" Universe
and deconfinement in the "early" Universe.
