Old Dark Energy

TL;DR

This paper explores the evolution of dark energy in the universe, proposing a new parametrization method that accounts for its matter-dominated past and can be constrained by observations.

Contribution

It introduces a novel parametrization for dark energy evolution that incorporates its matter-dominated history and improves predictive tractability.

Findings

The proposed parametrization covers a wide range of dark energy behaviors.

It provides a more realistic initial condition setup for dark energy models.

The approach can be effectively constrained by observational data.

Abstract

Dark energy dynamics in the recent universe is influenced by its evolution through the long, matter dominated expansion history. A particular dynamical property, the flow variable, remains constant in several classes of scalar field models as long as matter dominates; the dark energy is only free to diverge in behavior at recent times. This gives natural initial conditions for Monte Carlo studies of dark energy dynamics. We propose a parametrization for the later evolution that covers a wide range of possible behaviors, is tractable in making predictions, and can be constrained by observations. We compare the approach to directly parametrizing the potential, which does not take into account the maturity of the dark energy dynamics.