Related papers: Quintessence and the cosmological constant
Quintessence - the energy density of a slowly evolving scalar field - may constitute a dynamical form of the homogeneous dark energy in the universe. We review the basic idea and indicate observational tests which may distinguish…
Dynamical vacuum energy or quintessence, a slowly varying and spatially inhomogeneous component of the energy density with negative pressure, is currently consistent with the observational data. One potential difficulty with the idea of…
Recently it has been proposed that the main contributor to the dark energy of the Universe is a dynamical, slow evolving, spatially inhomogeneous scalar field called quintessence. We investigate the behavior of this scalar field at galactic…
A diverse set of observations now compellingly suggest that Universe possesses a nonzero cosmological constant. In the context of quantum-field theory a cosmological constant corresponds to the energy density of the vacuum, and the wanted…
We study the cosmology of a quintessence scalar field which is equivalent to a non-barotropic perfect fluid of constant pressure. The coincidence problem is alleviated by such a quintessence equation-of-state that interpolates between…
We investigate the possibility of replacing the cosmological constant with gradual condensation of a scalar field produced during the decay of a superheavy dark matter. The advantage of this class of models to the ordinary quintessence is…
I briefly review the cosmological constant problem and the issue of dark energy (or quintessence). Within the framework of quantum field theory, the vacuum expectation value of the energy momentum tensor formally diverges as $k^4$. A cutoff…
The two most popular candidates for dark energy, i.e. a cosmological constant and quintessence, are very difficult to distinguish observationally, mostly because the quintessence field does not have sizable fluctuations. We study a scalar…
There is some evidence that the Universe is presently undergoing accelerating expansion. This has restored some credit to the scenarios with a non-vanishing cosmological constant. From the point of view of a theory of fundamental…
Recent observations suggest that a large fraction of the energy density of the universe has negative pressure. One explanation is vacuum energy density; another is quintessence in the form of a scalar field slowly evolving down a potential.…
In this article the cosmological constant problems, as well as the astronomical evidence for a cosmologically significant homogeneous exotic energy density with negative pressure (quintessence), are reviewed for a broad audience of…
Within present constraints on the observed smooth energy and its equation of state parameter, it is important to find out whether the smooth energy is static (cosmological constant) or dynamic (quintessence). The most dynamical quintessence…
Quintessence theories for cosmic acceleration imbue dark energy with a non-trivial dynamics that offers hope in distinguishing the physical origin of the component. We review quintessence models with an emphasis on this dynamics and discuss…
Physics invites the idea that space contains energy whose gravitational effect approximates that of Einstein's cosmological constant, Lambda; nowadays the concept is termed dark energy or quintessence. Physics also suggests the dark energy…
The old cosmological constant problem is to understand why the vacuum energy is so small; the new problem is to understand why it is comparable to the present mass density. Several approaches to these problems are reviewed. Quintessence…
Some issues of the cosmological constant or dark energy are briefly reviewed. There are an increasing number of observations that constrain the equation of state of dark energy more stringently and favor the time-independent cosmological…
We show how the scalar field, a candidate of quintessence, in a proposed model of the scalar-tensor theories of gravity provides a way to understand a small but nonzero cosmological constant as indicated by recent observations. A particular…
Some form of missing energy may account for the difference between the observed cosmic matter density and the critical density. Two leading candidates are a cosmological constant and quintessence (a time-varying, inhomogenous component with…
Recent cosmological observations suggest that nearly seventy per cent of the energy density in the universe is unclustered and has negative pressure. Several conceptual issues related to the modeling of this component (`dark energy'), which…
We consider a model of interacting cosmological constant/quintessence, where dark matter and dark energy behave as, respectively, two coexisting phases of a fluid, a thermally excited Bose component and a condensate, respectively. In a…