Observational constraints on electromagnetic Born-Infeld cosmology

TL;DR

This study tests electromagnetic Born-Infeld cosmology against observational data and finds it does not significantly contribute to the universe's accelerated expansion, suggesting it is unlikely to be the cause of dark energy.

Contribution

First comprehensive observational constraints on electromagnetic Born-Infeld cosmology using multiple cosmological probes.

Findings

BI electromagnetic matter has a small present-day abundance (~0.037) according to SNIa and Hubble data.

GRB data suggests a higher abundance (~0.304), possibly indicating importance at earlier epochs.

Electromagnetic Born-Infeld matter cannot explain the current accelerated expansion of the universe.

Abstract

The cosmological model consisting of an electromagnetic Born-Infeld (BI) field coupled to a Robertson-Walker geometry is tested with the standard probes of SNIa, GRBs and direct Hubble parameter. The analysis shows that the inclusion of the nonlinear electromagnetic component does not contribute in a significative way to the observed expansion. The BI electromagnetic matter is considered with an abundance of $\Omega_{BI}$, that our best fit leads to $\Omega_{BI}=0.037$ when tested with SNIa and the Hubble parameter data (0.1<z<1.75); while when tested with GRBs the result is of $\Omega_{BI}=0.304$, which may indicate that this electrodynamics was important at epochs close to the appearance of large structure (redshifts of approximately 7), although this late result has not as much reliability as that corresponding to the first two probes, since we know that the dispersion in GRBs data is still considerable. In view of these results we can rule out the electromagnetic Born-Infeld matter as the origin of the present accelerated expansion, this conclusion concerns exclusively the Born-Infeld theory.