Quintessence versus phantom dark energy: the arbitrating power of current and future observations

TL;DR

This paper evaluates current and future cosmological observations' ability to differentiate between quintessence and phantom dark energy models, finding that CMB data and upcoming large-scale structure surveys are crucial for discrimination.

Contribution

It assesses the discriminative power of existing and upcoming observational data in distinguishing quintessence from phantom dark energy models.

Findings

Current CMB and BAO data can partially distinguish models.

Future large-scale structure surveys will improve discrimination.

SNe Ia data alone are insufficient for model differentiation.

Abstract

We analyze the possibility to distinguish between quintessence and phantom scalar field models of dark energy using observations of luminosity distance moduli of SNe Ia, CMB anisotropies and polarization, matter density perturbations and baryon acoustic oscillations. Among the present observations only Planck data on CMB anisotropy and SDSS DR9 data on baryon acoustic oscillations may be able to decide between quintessence or phantom scalar field models, however for each model a set of best-fit parameters exists, which matches all data with similar goodness of fit. We compare the relative differences of best-fit model predictions with observational uncertainties for each type of data and we show that the accuracy of SNe Ia luminosity distance data is far from the one necessary to distinguish these types of dark energy models, while the CMB data (WMAP, ACT, SPT and especially Planck) are close to being able to reliably distinguish them. Also an improvement of the large-scale structure data (future releses of SDSS BOSS and e.g. Euclid or BigBOSS) will enable us to surely decide between quintessence and phantom dark energy.