Constraints on Metastable Dark Energy Decaying into Dark Matter

We revisit the proposal that an energy transfer from dark energy into dark matter can be described in field theory by a first order phase transition. We analyze the model proposed in Ref. Abdalla et al. (2013), using updated constraints on the decay time of a metastable dark energy from the work of Ref. Shafieloo et al. (2018). The results of our analysis show no prospects for potentially observable signals that could distinguish this scenario. We also show that such model would not drive a complete transition to a dark matter dominated phase even in a distant future. Nevertheless, the model is not excluded by the latest data and we confirm that the mass of the dark matter particle that would result from such a process corresponds to an axion-like particle, which is currently one of the best motivated dark matter candidates. We argue that extensions to this model, possibly with additional couplings, still deserve further attention as it could provide an interesting and viable description for an interacting dark sector scenario based in a single scalar field.