A New view of k-essence

By Michael Malquarti, Edmund J. Copeland, Andrew R. Liddle, M. Trodden. 2003

175 citations recorded by the source corpus.

K-essence models, relying on scalar fields with non-canonical kinetic terms, have been proposed as an alternative to quintessence in explaining the observed acceleration of the Universe. We consider the use of field redefinitions to cast k-essence in a more familiar form. While k-essence models cannot in general be rewritten in the form of quintessence models, we show that in certain dynamical regimes an equivalence can be made, which in particular can shed light on the tracking behaviour of k-essence. In several cases, k-essence cannot be observationally distinguished from quintessence using the homogeneous evolution, though there may be small effects on the perturbation spectrum. We make a detailed analysis of two k-essence models from the literature and comment on the nature of the fine tuning arising in the models.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/bf759c1bb9241494387a5e4b2f65e2556853461d

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. H. K. Jassal
2. J. Bagla
3. A. Silvestri
4. M. Trodden
5. Thanu Padmanabhan
6. S. Tsujikawa
7. T.Padmanabhan
8. M. Setare

In Nuclear and High Energy Physics

1. A. Silvestri
2. H. K. Jassal
3. J. Bagla
4. Thanu Padmanabhan
5. M. Trodden
6. S. Tsujikawa
7. T.Padmanabhan
8. R. Cai

Citations in the corpus

• Approaches to understanding cosmic acceleration (2009, background): “Most interestingly though, the varying speed of sound (compared to c(2)s = 1 for canonical models) opens the window to possible observational signatures of these models (which can otherwise be difficult to distinguish from canonical ones [98]) in observations of large scale structure in the universe”
• WMAP constraints on low redshift evolution of dark energy (2004, background): “…& Roos 2002; Rubano & Scudellaro 2002; Sen & Seshadri 2003; Steinhardt 2003), k-essence (Armendariz-Picon, Mukhanov & Steinhardt 2001; Chiba 2002; Malquarti et al. 2003; Chimento & Feinstein 2004; Scherrer 2004), tachyons (Choudhury et al. 2002; Frolov, Kofman & Starobinsky 2002; Gibbons 2002;…”