Theoretical priors in scalar-tensor cosmologies: Thawing quintessence

TL;DR

This paper derives theoretical priors for scalar-tensor dark energy models, specifically quintessence, providing analytic distributions for the equation of state that enhance observational constraints in future cosmological surveys.

Contribution

It introduces an analytic prior for the equation of state in quintessence models, improving the predictive power and constraints in cosmological data analysis.

Findings

Derived the time dependence of the equation of state for various potentials

Proposed an analytic prior distribution for the equation of state

Enhanced constraints on dark energy parameters with theoretical priors

Abstract

The late time acceleration of the Universe can be characterized in terms of an extra, time dependent, component of the universe -- dark energy. The simplest proposal for dark energy is a scalar-tensor theory -- quintessence -- which consists of a scalar field, $\phi$, whose dynamics is solely dictated by its potential, $V(\phi)$. Such a theory can be uniquely characterized by the equation of state of the scalar field energy momentum-tensor. We find the time dependence of the equation of state for a broad family of potentials and, using this information, we propose an analytic prior distribution for the most commonly used parametrization. We show that this analytic prior can be used to accurately predict the distribution of observables for the next generation of cosmological surveys. Including the theoretical priors in the comparison with observations considerably improves the constraints on the equation of state.