Re-examining the role of curvature in the slowing down acceleration scenario

TL;DR

This paper re-examines the evolution of cosmic acceleration using recent observational data, finding that including spatial curvature does not resolve tensions between different data sets and that the universe's acceleration behavior depends on the data combination.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive analysis of the impact of spatial curvature on cosmic acceleration using latest data, challenging previous claims about curvature alleviating data tensions.

Findings

Including spatial curvature does not resolve tensions between SNIa+BAO and CMB data.

Most data combinations favor a slowing down of cosmic acceleration.

When CMB data is included, observations support a flat universe with accelerating expansion.

Abstract

By incorporating the curvature $\Omega_k$ as a free parameter, it has been found that the tension between the high redshift CMB shift parameter $R(z^{\ast})$ data and the low redshift SNIa and BAO data from the combination of SDSS and 2dFGRS can be ameliorated, and both SNIa+BAO and SNIa+BAO+CMB favor that the decelerating parameter $q(z)$ shows a rapid variation in sign at small redshift. In this paper, with the MCMC method, we re-examine the evolutionary behavior of $q(z)$ using the latest observational data including the Union2 SNIa, BAO, and CMB data ($R(z^{\ast})$, $l_{A}(z^{\ast})$, $z^{\ast}$) from WMAP7. For BAO data, four different data sets obtained from the 6dFGS, the combination of SDSS and 2dFGRS, the WiggleZ dark energy survey and the BOSS, are used. Except for the spatially flat case constrained by SNIa+ the WiggleZ BAO data, both SNIa and other BAO+SNIa favor that the present cosmic acceleration is slowing down irrespective of whether the spatial curvature is included or not. However, once the WMAP7 CMB data is included, observations favor strongly the $\Lambda$CDM model, a spatially flat universe, and a speeding-up of the cosmic acceleration. Therefore, the inclusion of spatial curvature seems to has no effect on alleviating the tension between SNIa+BAO and CMB in clear contrast to the previous work in the literature.