Related papers: Dark Energy: Recent Developments
A huge amount of good quality astrophysical data converges towards the picture of a spatially flat universe undergoing the today observed phase of accelerated expansion. This new observational trend is commonly addressed as Precision…
The acceleration of the cosmic expansion is a fundamental challenge to standard models of particle physics and cosmology. The new physics of dark energy may lie in the nature of gravity, the quantum vacuum, or extra dimensions. I give a…
A simple description of the vacuum energy (cosmological constant) problem for non-experts is presented. Basic features of cosmology with non-zero vacuum energy are discussed. The astronomical data which indicate that the universe is filled…
We find that current Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) anisotropy data strongly constrain the mean spatial curvature of the Universe to be near zero, or, equivalently, the total energy density to be near critical-as predicted by inflation.…
A web of interlocking observations has established that the expansion of the Universe is speeding up and not slowing, revealing the presence of some form of repulsive gravity. Within the context of general relativity the cause of cosmic…
Nearly seventy per cent of the energy density in the universe is unclustered and exerts negative pressure. This conclusion -- now supported by numerous observations -- poses the greatest challenge for theoretical physics today. I discuss…
I review the observational data most relevant for large scale structure. These data determine the system of cosmological parameters: the Hubble parameter, densities of various populations of the Universe, parameters characterizing the power…
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…
To explain the acceleration of the cosmological expansion researchers have considered an unusual form of mass-energy generically called dark energy. Dark energy has a ratio of pressure over mass density which obeys $w=p/\rho <-1/3$. This…
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…
From an observational perspective cosmology is today in excellent shape - advances in instrumentation and data processing have enabled us to study the universe in detail back to when the first galaxies formed, map the fluctuations in the…
We outline a dynamical dark energy scenario whose signatures may be simultaneously tested by astronomical observations and laboratory experiments. The dark energy is a field with slightly sub-gravitational couplings to matter, a logarithmic…
I consider some of the issues we face in trying to understand dark energy. Huge fluctuations in the unknown dark energy equation of state can be hidden in distance data, so I argue that model-independent tests which signal if the…
Despite the many efforts, our theoretical understanding of the ultimate nature of the dark energy component of the universe still lags well behind the astounding experimental evidence achieved from the increasingly sophisticated…
The most important problem in fundamental physics is the description of the contents of the Universe. Today, we know that 95% thereof is totally unknown. Two thirds of that amount is the mysterious Dark Energy described in an interesting…
In this work we perform some studies related to dark energy. Firstly, we propose a dynamical approach to explain the dark energy content of the universe. We assume that a massless scalar field couples to the Hubble parameter with some…
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…
In this article, we review a series of recent theoretical results regarding a conventional approach to the dark energy (DE) concept. This approach is distinguished among others for its simplicity and its physical relevance. By compromising…
The accelerated expansion of the Universe is one of the main discoveries of the past decades, indicating the presence of an unknown component: the dark energy. Evidence of its presence is being gathered by a succession of observational…
We propose a dynamical (quintessence) model of dark energy in the current universe with a renormalizable (Higgs-like) scalar potential. We prove the viability of our model (after fine tuning) for the certain range of the average scalar…