Can brane dark energy model be probed observationally by distant supernovae?

Abstract

The recent astronomical measurements of distant supernovae as well as other observations indicate that our universe is presently accelerating. There are different proposals for the explanation of this acceleration, such as the cosmological constant $\Lambda$, decaying vacuum energy, an evolving scalar field (quintessence), phantom energy, etc. Most of these proposals require the existence of exotic matter with negative pressure violating the strong energy condition. On the other hand, there have appeared many models which offer dramatically different mechanisms for the current acceleration, in which dark energy emerges from the gravity sector rather than from the matter sector. In this paper, we compare the concordance $\Lambda$CDM model with the Sahni-Shtanov brane-world models of dark energy by using the Akaike and Bayesian information criteria. We show that new parameters in the brane model are not statistically significant in terms of the information criteria, although the best fit method gives an improved fit to the SNIa data, because of the additional parameters. This is because the information criteria of model selection compensate for this advantage by penalizing models having more free parameters. We conclude that only new future observational data are accurate enough to give an advantage to dark-energy models of the brane origin, i.e., a very high-significance detection is required to justify the presence of new parameters. In our statistical analysis both Riess et al.'s and Astier et al.'s SNIa samples are used. For stringent constraining parameters of the models the baryon oscillation peak (BOP) test is used.

Improved version accepted for publication in PLB

References in corpus (23)

• Observational Evidence from Supernovae for an Accelerating Universe and a Cosmological Constant
• Measurements of Omega and Lambda from 42 High-Redshift Supernovae
• A Large Mass Hierarchy from a Small Extra Dimension
• An Alternative to Compactification
• The Cosmological Constant and Dark Energy
• First Year Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) Observations: Preliminary Maps and Basic Results
• Detection of the Baryon Acoustic Peak in the Large-Scale Correlation Function of SDSS Luminous Red Galaxies
• Type Ia Supernova Discoveries at z>1 From the Hubble Space Telescope: Evidence for Past Deceleration and Constraints on Dark Energy Evolution
• 4D Gravity on a Brane in 5D Minkowski Space
• Cosmology on a Brane in Minkowski Bulk
• Braneworld models of dark energy
• Statistics: Handle with Care, Detecting Multiple Model Components with the Likelihood Ratio Test
• Gravity on a Brane in Infinite-Volume Extra Space
• How many cosmological parameters?
• The Cosmological Constant Problem and Quintessence
• Three types of gamma-ray bursts
• Brane World Cosmology
• How a brane cosmological constant can trick us into thinking that w < -1
• Which cosmological model with dark energy -- phantom or LambdaCDM
• Testing for double inflation with WMAP
• Which cosmological models -- with dark energy or modified FRW dynamics?
• Closed System of Equations on a Brane
• Cosmic Mimicry: Is LCDM a Braneworld in Disguise ?

Cited by in corpus (10)

• On model selection forecasting, Dark Energy and modified gravity
• Confronting Braneworld Cosmology with Supernova data and Baryon Oscillations
• Two Component Model of Dark Energy
• Route to Lambda in conformally coupled phantom cosmology
• Gravitational instability on the brane: the role of boundary conditions
• Testing and selection of cosmological models with $(1+z{)}^6$ corrections
• Acceleration of the Universe driven by the Casimir force
• Paths of Friedmann-Robertson-Walker brane models
• Constraining bouncing cosmology caused by Casimir effect
• Kepler versus Akaike