Cosmological constant vs. quintessence

Abstract

There is some evidence that the Universe is presently undergoing accelerating expansion. This has restored some credit to the scenarios with a non-vanishing cosmological constant. From the point of view of a theory of fundamental interactions, one may argue that a dynamical component with negative pressure is easier to achieve. As an illustration, the quintessence scenario is described and its shortcomings are discussed in connection with the nagging ``cosmological constant problem''.

28 pages, 2 figures, lectures at Les Houches summer school 'The early Universe" and Peyresq 4 meeting, July 1999

References in corpus (6)

• The Cosmic Triangle: Revealing the State of the Universe
• Scaling solutions in general non-minimal coupling theories
• Quintessence and Supergravity
• Scalar-Tensor Gravity and Quintessence
• SUSY QCD and Quintessence
• On the Construction of Quintessential Inflation Models

Cited by in corpus (56)

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• A model of the Universe including Dark Energy accounted for by both a Quintessence Field and a (negative) Cosmological Constant
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• Cosmological-Model-Parameter Determination from Satellite-Acquired Type Ia and IIP Supernova Data
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• Natural Quintessence with Gauge Coupling Unification
• On exact solutions for quintessential (inflationary) cosmological models with exponential potentials
• Probing non-standard gravity with the growth index: a background independent analysis
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• Quintessence Unification Models from Non-Abelian Gauge Dynamics
• Quintessence Restrictions on Negative Power and Condensate Potentials
• Analysis of two quintessence models with SN Ia data
• Coupling Quintessence to Inflation in Supergravity
• The SUGRA Quintessence Model Coupled to the MSSM
• Cold Dark Matter in non-Standard Cosmologies, PAMELA, ATIC and Fermi LAT
• Quintessential Kination and Thermal Production of Gravitinos and Axinos
• Cosmology with exponential potentials
• Constraining Quintessence with the New CMB Data
• Dark Energy and the Observable Universe
• Moduli Fields as Quintessence and the Chameleon
• Cosmological parameters estimation in the Quintessence Paradigm
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• Stochastic Quintessence
• Interacting Dark Energy: Decay into Fermions
• Cosmological acceleration
• Quintessential brane cosmology
• Quintessence and the Underlying Particle Physics Theory
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• Future supernova probes of quintessence
• Dark Group: Dark Energy and Dark Matter
• Interacting dark energy: generic cosmological evolution for two scalar fields
• Future Island Universes in a Background Universe Accelerated by Cosmological Constant and by Quintessence
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• No cosmological domain wall problem for weakly coupled fields
• Nontrival Cosmological Constant in Brane Worlds with Unorthodox Lagrangians
• Dilaton dominance relaxes LHC and cosmological constraints in supersymmetric models
• On the holographic dark energy in chameleon scalar-tensor cosmology
• Chameleon mechanism with a new potential
• Bound Dark Energy: towards understanding the nature of the Dark Energy
• The Fate of the Universe: Dark Energy Dilution?
• Acceptable Inverse Power Law Potential Quintessence with n=18/7
• Gravitational Forces on a Codimension-2 Brane
• Dynamical Instability of Self-Tuning Solution with Antisymmetric Tensor Field
• Estimations of the cosmological parameters from the observational variation of the fine structure constant
• Single scale factor for the universe from the creation of radiation and matter till the present