English

Constraints on DBI dark energy with chameleon mechanism

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics 2026-05-28 v2 General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology

Abstract

In this work, we investigate the Dirac--Born--Infeld (DBI) scalar field model with and without the inclusion of the chameleon mechanism in light of the latest cosmological observations. We constrain the model using data from Pantheon Plus, DES Y5, DESI DR2, and the compressed Planck likelihood. We consider an AdS throat of the form f(ϕ)=λ/ϕ4f(\phi) = \lambda / \phi^4 and a potential V(ϕ)=m02ϕ2+m12ϕ4V(\phi) = m_0^2 \phi^2 + m_1^2 \phi^4. Our analysis shows that, for both cases, the mean value m10m_1 \simeq 0 suggests that the DBI field may lack significant self-interaction, with only an upper bound on m1m_1. The warp parameter is constrained to η0\eta \geq 0, while the chameleon coupling satisfies β0\beta \leq 0. No crossing of the phantom divide is observed under the assumed form of the warp factor and potential. We perform a statistical model comparison using the ΔAIC\Delta \mathrm{AIC} relative to the Λ\LambdaCDM model. Although the DBI model provides a slightly better fit to the data in terms of Δχ2\Delta \chi^2, the improvement is negligible. Consequently, the DBI model is mildly disfavored for both the cases compared to the Λ\LambdaCDM model.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2508.05436,
  title  = {Constraints on DBI dark energy with chameleon mechanism},
  author = {Burin Gumjudpai and Nandan Roy and John Ward},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2508.05436},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

10 pages 8 figures