Related papers: Future directions in cosmology
After about two decades of the first observational papers confirming the accelerated expansion of the universe, we are still facing the question whether the cause of it is a rigid cosmological constant $\Lambda$-term or a mildly evolving…
The dark energy cosmology with the equation of state $w=constant$ is considered in this paper. The $\Omega_{DE}-\Omega_{M}$ plane has been used to study the present state and expansion history of the universe. Through the mathematical…
Dark energy is one of the deepest puzzles in modern cosmology, and mounting evidence suggests that it is not just a cosmological constant but a genuinely dynamical component. Although cosmology and dynamical systems theory emerged from…
The discovery of the accelerating universe in the late 1990s was a watershed moment in modern cosmology, as it indicated the presence of a fundamentally new, dominant contribution to the energy budget of the universe. Evidence for dark…
Recent astronomical observations of SNIa, CMB, as well as BAO in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, suggest that the current Universe has entered a stage of an accelerated expansion with the transition redshift at $z \simeq 0.5$. While the…
I consider a scenario proposed by Fardon, Nelson and Weiner where dark energy and neutrinos are connected. As a result, neutrino masses are not constant but depend on the neutrino number density. By examining the full equation of state for…
The discovery of universe's late-time acceleration and dark energy has overseen a great deal of research into cosmological singularities and in this brief review, we discuss all the prominent developments in this field for the best part of…
Current data in the form of baryon acoustic oscillation, supernova, and cosmic microwave background distances prefer a cosmology that accelerates more strongly than $\Lambda$CDM at $z\approx0.5-1.5$, and more weakly at $z\lesssim0.5$. We…
We discuss a model of the universe where dark energy is replaced by electrically-charged extremely-massive dark matter. The cosmological constant has a value of the same order as the mean matter density, consistent with observations, and is…
Dark matter represents currently an outstanding problem in both cosmology and particle physics. In this review we discuss the possible explanations for dark matter and the experimental observables which can eventually lead to the discovery…
All observational evidence for dark matter and dark energy is so far exclusively gravitational. Hence, the dark sector may be equivalently described by a theory of the spacetime metric whose dynamics is affected by interactions with an…
A six parameter cosmological model, involving a vacuum energy density that is extremely tiny compared to fundamental particle physics scales, describes a large body of increasingly accurate astronomical data. In a first part of this brief…
While purely philosophical in the early times, and still very speculative at the beginning of the twentieth century, Cosmology has gradually entered into the realm of experimental science over the past eighty years. It has raised some…
These lectures have been given to particle physicists, mostly experimentalists and very briefly and at a pedestrian level review the problems of dark matter. The content of the lectures is the following: 1. Introduction. 2. Cosmological…
The discovery that we live in an accelerating universe changed drastically the paradigm of physics and introduced the concept of \textit{dark energy}. In this work, we present a brief historical description of the main events related to the…
We consider ultralight scalar dark matter that couples to right-handed neutrinos. Due to the high density of neutrinos in the early universe, the background neutrino density dominates the dynamics of the scalar field, and qualitatively…
Investigations on dark energy (DE) are currently inconclusive about its time evolution. Hints of this possibility do however glow now and then in the horizon. Herein we assess the current status of dynamical dark energy (DDE) in the light…
The current expansion of the Universe has been observed to be accelerating, and the widely accepted spatially-flat concordance model of general relativistic cosmology attributes this phenomenon to a constant dark energy, a cosmological…
It is now believed that the universe is composed of a small amount of the normal luminous matter, a substantial amount of matter (Cold Dark Matter: CDM) which is non-luminous and a large amount of smooth energy (Dark Energy: DE). Both CDM…
Recently, the observed equation of state for dark energy appears to favor values below $-1$. The tendency implies that the nature of dark energy may be quite different from that of the cosmological constant. In view of the adjustment on the…