van de Bruck, C. and Thomas, C.C. (2019) Dark energy, the swampland, and the equivalence principle. Physical Review D, 100 (2). 023515. ISSN 2470-0010
Abstract
It has recently been argued that string theory does not admit de Sitter vacua. This would imply that the current accelerated expansion of the universe is not driven by a cosmological constant (or vacuum energy) but by other means such as a quintessential scalar field. Such a scalar field is in general expected to couple to at least some matter species, such as dark matter. Cosmological observations already constrain such dark matter couplings strongly. We argue that there are a number of interesting scenarios to be explored, such as coupling functions which possess a minimum at finite field values. In these theories, the effective gravitational coupling between dark matter particles grows with time and are consistent with observations of the anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background radiation and large scale structures. We argue that such couplings might also help to alleviate the tension between the swampland conjectures and the properties of the quintessential potential. Observational signatures of violations of the equivalence principle in the dark sector are expected in the non-linear regime on intermediate or small scales.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
---|---|
Authors/Creators: |
|
Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article’s title, journal citation, and DOI. |
Dates: |
|
Institution: | The University of Sheffield |
Academic Units: | The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Science (Sheffield) > School of Mathematics and Statistics (Sheffield) |
Funding Information: | Funder Grant number SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY FACILITIES COUNCIL ST/P000800/1 |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Sheffield |
Date Deposited: | 13 May 2019 10:18 |
Last Modified: | 14 Jan 2020 15:56 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | American Physical Society |
Refereed: | Yes |
Identification Number: | 10.1103/PhysRevD.100.023515 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:145914 |