Interacting Tachyon: generic cosmological evolution for a tachyon and a scalar field

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the cosmological evolution of a coupled tachyon and scalar field system, revealing conditions under which the tachyon mimics matter or radiation, thus addressing the tachyonic matter problem.

Contribution

It provides an analytical framework for understanding the dynamics of interacting tachyon and scalar fields in cosmology, including conditions for their energy densities to scale similarly to matter or radiation.

Findings

Tachyon field can behave as matter or radiation depending on interaction

Analytical conditions for energy density scaling are derived

Numerical solutions illustrate different asymptotic behaviors

Abstract

We study the cosmological evolution of a tachyon scalar field T with a Dirac-Born-Infeld type lagrangian and potential V(T) coupled to a canonically normalized scalar field \phi with an arbitrary interaction term B(T,\phi) in the presence of a barotropic fluid $\rb$, which can be matter or radiation. The force between the barotropic fluid and the scalar fields is only gravitational. We show that the dynamics is completely determine by only three parameters L1 = - V_T/ V^{3/2}, L2= - B_T /B^{3/2} and L3 =-B_{\phi}/B. We determine analytically theconditions for $\lm_i$ under which the energy density of T, \phi and $\rb$ have the same redshift. We study the behavior of T and \phi in the asymptotic limits for L_i and we show the numerical solution for different interesting cases. The effective equation of state for the tachyon field changes due to the interaction with the scalar field and we show that it is possible for a tachyon field to redshift as matter in the absence of an interaction term B and as radiation when B is turned on. This result solves then the tachyonic matter problem.