Dark energy two decades after: Observables, probes, consistency tests

TL;DR

This review summarizes two decades of dark energy research, highlighting observational evidence, theoretical descriptions, and various probes used to understand the universe's accelerated expansion.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of the developments, methods, and current status of dark energy studies, emphasizing the progress made in understanding its nature.

Findings

Strong evidence for dark energy from multiple measurements

Parametric models help describe dark energy properties

Various cosmological probes offer complementary insights

Abstract

The discovery of the accelerating universe in the late 1990s was a watershed moment in modern cosmology, as it indicated the presence of a fundamentally new, dominant contribution to the energy budget of the universe. Evidence for dark energy, the new component that causes the acceleration, has since become extremely strong, owing to an impressive variety of increasingly precise measurements of the expansion history and the growth of structure in the universe. Still, one of the central challenges of modern cosmology is to shed light on the physical mechanism behind the accelerating universe. In this review, we briefly summarize the developments that led to the discovery of dark energy. Next, we discuss the parametric descriptions of dark energy and the cosmological tests that allow us to better understand its nature. We then review the cosmological probes of dark energy. For each probe, we briefly discuss the physics behind it and its prospects for measuring dark energy properties. We end with a summary of the current status of dark energy research.