What do we really know about Dark Energy?

Abstract

In this paper I discuss what we truly know about dark energy. I shall argue that up to date our single indication for the existence of dark energy comes from distance measurements and their relation to redshift. Supernovae, CMB anisotropies and observations of baryon acoustic oscillations, they all simply tell us that the observed distance to a given redshift is larger than the one expected from a Friedmann Lemaitre universe with matter only and the locally measured Hubble parameter.

invited talk at the meeting "Cosmological Tests of General Relativity" at the Kavli Royal Society Center for the Advancement of Science organized by Rachel Bean, Pedro Ferreira and Andy Taylor. 14p 2 figs. revised version: updated to match version in print in Phil. Trans. R. Soc. A

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• Technically natural dark energy from Lorentz breaking
• A new method for the Alcock-Paczynski test
• Cosmic distance duality and cosmic transparency
• Methods for studying the accuracy of light propagation in N-body simulations
• Testing $\Lambda$CDM cosmology in a binned universe: anomalies in the deceleration parameter
• Measuring the transition to homogeneity with photometric redshift surveys
• Distance-redshift relation in plane symmetric universes
• CMB dipoles and other low-order multipoles in the quasispherical Szekeres model
• Back Reaction from Walls
• Reconstruction of Dynamical Dark Energy Potentials: Quintessence, Tachyon and interacting models
• The cosmological constant filter without big bang singularity
• A consistent scalar-tensor cosmology for inflation, dark energy and the Hubble parameter
• Dark Energy from Quantum Uncertainty of Distant Clock
• Navigating permanent underdetermination in dark energy and inflationary cosmology
• Infrared-modified Universe
• Cosmological Constant from Boundary Condition and Its Implications beyond the Standard Model
• Study of cylindrically symmetric solutions in metric f(R) gravity with constant R
• Relativistic Theory of Superluminal Particles
• Evolution of Cosmological Total Energy Density and Transient Periods in Cosmology
• Use of Redshifts as Evidence of Dark Energy