English

Dark Matter and Dark Energy

Astrophysics 2022-07-19 v4 General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology High Energy Physics - Phenomenology High Energy Physics - Theory

Abstract

I briefly review our current understanding of dark matter and dark energy. The first part of this paper focusses on issues pertaining to dark matter including observational evidence for its existence, current constraints and the `abundance of substructure' and `cuspy core' issues which arise in CDM. I also briefly describe MOND. The second part of this review focusses on dark energy. In this part I discuss the significance of the cosmological constant problem which leads to a predicted value of the cosmological constant which is almost 1012310^{123} times larger than the observed value \la/8πG1047\la/8\pi G \simeq 10^{-47}GeV4^4. Setting \la\la to this small value ensures that the acceleration of the universe is a fairly recent phenomenon giving rise to the `cosmic coincidence' conundrum according to which we live during a special epoch when the density in matter and \la\la are almost equal. Anthropic arguments are briefly discussed but more emphasis is placed upon dynamical dark energy models in which the equation of state is time dependent. These include Quintessence, Braneworld models, Chaplygin gas and Phantom energy. Model independent methods to determine the cosmic equation of state and the Statefinder diagnostic are also discussed. The Statefinder has the attractive property \atridot/aH3=1\atridot/a H^3 = 1 for LCDM, which is helpful for differentiating between LCDM and rival dark energy models. The review ends with a brief discussion of the fate of the universe in dark energy models.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.astro-ph/0403324,
  title  = {Dark Matter and Dark Energy},
  author = {Varun Sahni},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:astro-ph/0403324},
  year   = {2022}
}

Comments

40 pages, 11 figures, Lectures presented at the Second Aegean Summer School on the Early Universe, Syros, Greece, September 2003, New References added Final version to appear in the Proceedings; typo's corrected. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:0910.5406, arXiv:0808.0826, arXiv:1105.1087 by other authors

R2 v1 2026-07-22T08:35:59.272Z