Quintessence and the Underlying Particle Physics Theory

Abstract

At present we know nothing about the nature of the dark energy accounting for about 70% of the energy density of the Universe. One possibility is that the dark energy is provided by an extremely light field, the quintessence, rolling down its potential. Even though the underlying particle theory responsible for the present quintessential behaviour of our Universe is unknown, such a theory is likely to have contact with supersymmetry, supergravity or (super)string theory. In these theories, there are plenty of scalar fields (moduli) which are gravitationally coupled to all the other degrees of freedom and have vacuum expectation values of the order of the Planck scale. We point out that, in theories which allow a consistent embedding of quintessence, the generic gravitational interaction of the moduli fields with the quintessence field gives rise to a contribution to the energy density from the moduli fields of the order of the critical energy density of the universe today. Furthermore, the interaction contribution can generically enhance the negativity of the equation of state.

16 pages, 1 figure; expanded discussion of generality; version to be published by PLB

References in corpus (8)

• The Cosmic Triangle: Revealing the State of the Universe
• Quintessence and Supergravity
• Phenomenology of a realistic accelerating universe using only Planck-scale physics
• Inflation and quintessence with nonminimal coupling
• The Robustness of Quintessence
• The Cosmic Microwave Background and Particle Physics
• Quintessence models in Supergravity
• Cosmological constant vs. quintessence

Cited by in corpus (13)

• The Physics of Cosmic Acceleration
• Super-acceleration as Signature of Dark Sector Interaction
• Revisiting a negative cosmological constant from low-redshift data
• Evolution of dark energy reconstructed from the latest observations
• Quintessential Enhancement of Dark Matter Abundance
• Quintessence From The Decay of a Superheavy Dark Matter
• Coupling Quintessence to Inflation in Supergravity
• Cold Dark Matter in non-Standard Cosmologies, PAMELA, ATIC and Fermi LAT
• Quantum Corrections in Quintessence Models
• Gauge Quintessence
• Tracking Quintessence and Cold Dark Matter Candidates
• Cosmological Condensation of Scalar Fields -- Making a dark energy
• Partition function approach to non-Gaussian likelihoods: Formalism and expansions for weakly non-Gaussian cosmological inference