Energy Conditions and Cosmic Acceleration

Abstract

In general relativity, the energy conditions are invoked to restrict general energy-momentum tensors $T_{\mu \nu }$ in different frameworks, and to derive general results that hold in a variety of general contexts on physical grounds. We show that in the standard Friedmann-Lemaitre-Robertson-Walker (FLRW) approach, where the equation of state of the cosmological fluid is unknown, the energy conditions provide model-independent bounds on the behavior of the distance modulus of cosmic sources as a function of the redshift for any spatial curvature. We use the most recent type Ia supernovae (SNe Ia) observations, which include the new Hubble Space Telescope SNe Ia events, to carry out a model-independent analysis of the energy conditions violation in the context of the standard cosmology. We show that both the null (NEC), weak (WEC) and dominant (DEC) conditions, which are associated with the existence of the so-called phantom fields, seem to have been violated only recently ($z\lesssim 0.2$), whereas the condition for attractive gravity, i.e., the strong energy condition (SEC) was firstly violated billions of years ago, at $z\gtrsim 1$.

6 pages, 3 figures. v2: References added, misprints corrected, published in Phys.Rev.D in the present form

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