We suggest the phenomenological model of emergence of the dynamic aether as a result of decay of the SU(N) symmetric field configuration containing the multiplet of vector fields. The scenario of the transition to the dynamic aether, which is characterized by one unit timelike vector field that is associated with the aether velocity, is based on the idea of spontaneous color polarization analogous to the spontaneous electric polarization in ferroelectric materials. The mechanism of spontaneous color polarization is described in the framework of anisotropic cosmological model of the Bianchi-I type; it involves consideration of the idea of critical behavior of the eigenvalues of the tensor of color polarization in the course of the Universe accelerated expansion. The interim stage of transition from the color aether to the canonic dynamic aether takes the finite period of time, the duration of which is predetermined by the phenomenologically introduced critical value of the expansion scalar.

We establish a nonlinear version of the SU(N)-symmetric theory, which describes self-consistently the interaction between the gravitational, gauge, vector and pseudoscalar (axion) fields. In the context of this theory the SU(N)-symmetric multiplet of vector fields is associated with the color aether, the decay of which in the early Universe produced the canonic dynamic aether and the axionic dark matter. The SU(N)-symmetric Yang–Mills field, associated with the color aether, forms the source, which transfers the energy of the decaying color aether to the axion field. The nonlinear modification of the model uses explicitly the requirement of discrete symmetry, prescribed by the axion field, and is based on the analogy with a nonlinear physical pendulum. We show that in the framework of this nonlinear regular model, the axion field can grow to an arbitrarily large value, thus explaining the abundance of the axionic dark matter in the Universe.