  In this contribution one examines the coupling of dark energy to the gauge
fields, to neutrinos, and to the Higgs field. In the first case, one shows how
a putative evolution of the fundamental couplings of strong and weak
interactions via coupling to dark energy through a generalized Bekenstein-type
model may cause deviations on the statistical nuclear decay Rutherford-Soddy
law. Existing bounds for the weak interaction exclude any significant
deviation. For neutrinos, a perturbative approach is developed which allows for
considering viable varying mass neutrino models coupled to any
quintessence-type field. The generalized Chaplygin model is considered as an
example. For the coupling with the Higgs field one obtains an interesting
cosmological solution which includes the unification of dark energy and dark
matter.
