English

Is it possible to observationally distinguish adiabatic Quartessence from LambdaCDM?

Astrophysics 2009-11-11 v2

Abstract

The equation of state (EOS) in quartessence models interpolates between two stages: p0p\simeq 0 at high energy densities and pρp\approx -\rho at small ones. In the quartessence models analyzed up to now, the EOS is convex, implying increasing adiabatic sound speed (cs2c_{s}^{2}) as the energy density decreases in an expanding Universe. A non-negligible cs2c_{s}^{2} at recent times is the source of the matter power spectrum problem that plagued all convex (non-silent) quartessence models. Viability for these cosmologies is only possible in the limit of almost perfect mimicry to Λ\LambdaCDM. In this work we investigate if similarity to Λ\LambdaCDM is also required in the class of quartessence models whose EOS changes concavity as the Universe evolves. We focus our analysis in the simple case in which the EOS has a step-like shape, such that at very early times p0p\simeq0, and at late times pconst<0p\simeq const<0. For this class of models a non-negligible cs2c_{s}^{2} is a transient phenomenon, and could be relevant only at a more early epoch. We show that agreement with a large set of cosmological data requires that the transition between these two asymptotic states would have occurred at high redshift (zt38z_t\gtrsim38). This leads us to conjecture that the cosmic expansion history of any successful non-silent quartessence is (practically) identical to the Λ\LambdaCDM one.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.astro-ph/0604013,
  title  = {Is it possible to observationally distinguish adiabatic Quartessence from LambdaCDM?},
  author = {L. Amendola and M. Makler and R. R. R. Reis and I. Waga},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:astro-ph/0604013},
  year   = {2009}
}

Comments

5 pages, 7 figures, revised version to appear in PRD