Quintom cosmology and modified gravity after DESI 2024

TL;DR

This paper reconstructs the universe's dark energy evolution using DESI data, revealing a quintom behavior crossing the cosmological constant boundary, and explores modified gravity theories that can produce such dynamics.

Contribution

It introduces a Gaussian process reconstruction of dark energy dynamics from DESI data and demonstrates how certain modified gravity models can realize quintom behavior.

Findings

Reconstructed dark-energy EoS crosses -1 from phantom to quintessence.

Certain $f(R)$, $f(T)$, and $f(Q)$ gravity models can produce quintom dynamics.

Quadratic deviations from $\Lambda$CDM are mildly favored by data.

Abstract

We reconstruct the cosmological background evolution under the scenario of dynamical dark energy through the Gaussian process approach, using the latest Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) baryon acoustic oscillations (BAO) combined with other observations. Our results reveal that the reconstructed dark-energy equation-of-state (EoS) parameter $w(z)$ exhibits the so-called quintom-B behavior, crossing $-1$ from phantom to quintessence regime as the universe expands. We investigate under what situation this type of evolution could be achieved from the perspectives of field theories and modified gravity. In particular, we reconstruct the corresponding actions for $f(R)$, $f(T)$, and $f(Q)$ gravity, respectively. We explicitly show that, certain modified gravity can exhibit the quintom dynamics and fit the recent DESI data efficiently, and for all cases the quadratic deviation from the $\Lambda$CDM scenario is mildly favored.