Quintessence: a review

By S. Tsujikawa. 2013

709 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Quintessence is a canonical scalar field introduced to explain the late-time cosmic acceleration. The cosmological dynamics of quintessence is reviewed, paying particular attention to the evolution of the dark energy equation of state w. For the field potentials having tracking and thawing properties, the evolution of w can be known analytically in terms of a few model parameters. Using the analytic expression of w, we constrain quintessence models from the observations of supernovae type Ia, cosmic microwave background and baryon acoustic oscillations. The tracking freezing models are hardly distinguishable from the Λ-cold-dark-matter model, whereas in thawing models the today's field equation of state is constrained to be w0 < −0.7 (95% CL). We also derive an analytic formula for the growth rate of matter density perturbations in dynamical dark energy models, which allows a possibility of putting further bounds on w from the measurement of redshift-space distortions in the galaxy power spectrum. Finally, we review particle physics models of quintessence—such as those motivated by supersymmetric theories. The field potentials of thawing models based on a pseudo-Nambu–Goldstone boson or extended supergravity theories have a nice property that a tiny mass of quintessence can be protected against radiative corrections.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8fd623f978c0c6e061a053f8a8a88f8eef3bd066

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Citations in the corpus

Effective field theory of dark energy: A review (2019, background): “• Quintessence [250]: the action for quintessence reads”
De Sitter Space and the Swampland (2018, background): “However it could also be that the potential is positive but the scalar field is not at a minimum, as in quintessence models, as long as |∇V | is sufficiently small and of the order of V itself (for a review of quintessence models, see [1]).”
On the cosmological implications of the string Swampland (2018, background): “The equations of motion in terms of x and y are (see [28] for a recent review),”
Rock ‘n’ roll solutions to the Hubble tension (2019, background): “These exponential potentials have previously been studied in the context of quintessence models (see [30] for a review).”
Search for New Physics with Atoms and Molecules (2017, background): “…to search for new scalar bosons is the idea of quintessence, the proposal that the accelerating expansion of the universe is a result of the potential energy of a scalar field; for reviews see Frieman et al. (2008); Linder (2008); Padmanabhan (2003); Peebles and Ratra (2003); Tsujikawa (2013).”
A systematic approach to generalisations of General Relativity and their cosmological implications (2018, background): “For detailed studies of the k-essence field, see [92, 91, 155, 18, 114, 156].”
Dark energy in the swampland (2018, background): “Introducing the dynamical variables x = π̇/( √ 6HMP) and y = √ V /( √ 3HMP), we can bring the background equations of motion of the scalar field and the metric into the autonomous form [6]”