Related papers: K-Essential Phantom Energy: Doomsday around the co…
We discuss models that can account for today's dark energy. The underlying cosmological constant may be Planck scale but starts as a redundant coupling which can be eliminated by a field redefinition. The observed vacuum energy arises when…
String theories suggest the existence of a plethora of axion-like fields with masses spread over a huge number of decades. Here we show that these ideas lend themselves to a model of quintessence with no super-Planckian field excursions and…
In the standard cosmological framework of the 0th-order FLRW metric and the use of perfect fluids in the stress-energy tensor, dark energy with an equation-of-state parameter $w < -1$ (known as phantom dark energy) implies negative kinetic…
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…
K-essence has been proposed as a possible means of explaining the coincidence problem of the Universe beginning to accelerate only at the present epoch. We carry out a comprehensive dynamical systems analysis of the k-essence models given…
The issue of the vacuum energy of quantum fields is briefly reviewed. It is argued that this energy is normally either much too large or much too small to account for the dark energy, However, there are a few proposals in which it would be…
We consider finite-time, future (sudden or Big Rip type) singularities which may occur even when strong energy condition is not violated but equation of state parameter is time-dependent. Recently, example of such singularity has been…
The influence of a possible non zero chemical potential $\mu$ on the nature of dark energy is investigated by assuming that the dark energy is a relativistic perfect simple fluid obeying the equation of state (EoS), $p=\omega \rho$ ($\omega…
Recent cosmological observations strongly suggest that the universe is dominated by an unknown form of energy with negative pressure. Why is this dark energy density of order the critical density today? We propose that the dark energy has…
The nature of dark energy can be probed not only through its equation of state, but also through its microphysics, characterized by the sound speed of perturbations to the dark energy density and pressure. As the sound speed drops below the…
We discuss the modified gravity which includes negative and positive powers of the curvature and which provides the gravitational dark energy. It is shown that in GR plus the term containing negative power of the curvature the cosmic…
Quantum field theory allows for the suppression of vacuum fluctuations, leading to sub-vacuum phenomena. One of these is the appearance of local negative energy density. Selected aspects of negative energy will be reviewed, including the…
A set of temporal singularities (transients) in the mass-energy density and pressure, bearing a specific mathematical structure which represents a new solution to the continuity equation (\ie~conservation of mass-energy) and satisfying the…
We explore the fate of the universe given the possibility that the density associated with `dark energy' may decay slowly with time. Decaying dark energy is modeled by a homogeneous scalar field which couples minimally to gravity and whose…
Cosmologists are just beginning to probe the properties of the cosmic vacuum and its role in reversing the attractive pull of gravity to cause an acceleration in the expansion of the cosmos. The cause of this acceleration is given the…
We show that a generalised phantom Chaplygin gas can present a future singularity in a finite future cosmic time. Unlike the big rip singularity, this singularity happens for a finite scale factor, but like the big rip singularity, it would…
The higher dimensional cosmology provides a natural setting to treat, at a classical level, the cosmological effects of vacuum energy. Here we discuss two situations where starting with an ordinary matter field without any equation of state…
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…
Combinations of recent cosmological observations, including Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI), show hints of a dynamical nature for dark energy. While the data suggest the possibility of the phantom crossing, it is worth…
It has been argued that the correct, i.e. positive, sign of quantum vacuum energy density, or more properly, negative sign of quantum vacuum pressure, requires not a very large number, e.g. ~100, of additional, undiscovered fundamental…