Confronting the relaxation mechanism for a large cosmological constant with observations

TL;DR

This paper tests modified gravity models designed to dynamically neutralize a large cosmological constant against recent observational data, finding some models closely resemble the standard LambdaCDM cosmology.

Contribution

It provides the first comprehensive observational confrontation of a broad class of relaxation models for the cosmological constant, identifying viable models consistent with data.

Findings

Some models are nearly indistinguishable from LambdaCDM.

Certain relaxation models can solve the fine-tuning problem.

Models fit observational data well.

Abstract

In order to deal with a large cosmological constant a relaxation mechanism based on modified gravity has been proposed recently. By virtue of this mechanism the effect of the vacuum energy density of a given quantum field/string theory (no matter how big is its initial value in the early universe) can be neutralized dynamically, i.e. without fine tuning, and hence a Big Bang-like evolution of the cosmos becomes possible. Remarkably, a large class F^n_m of models of this kind, namely capable of dynamically adjusting the vacuum energy irrespective of its value and size, has been identified. In this paper, we carefully put them to the experimental test. By performing a joint likelihood analysis we confront these models with the most recent observational data on type Ia supernovae (SNIa), the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), the Baryonic Acoustic Oscillations (BAO) and the high redshift data on the expansion rate, so as to determine which ones are the most favored by observations. We compare the optimal relaxation models F^n_m found by this method with the standard or concordance LambdaCDM model, and find that some of these models may appear as almost indistinguishable from it. Interestingly enough, this shows that it is possible to construct viable solutions to the tough cosmological fine tuning problem with models that display the same basic phenomenological features as the concordance model.