Domain-wall Quintessence

TL;DR

This paper explores a domain-wall driven dark energy model with intrinsic anisotropy, analyzing its observational signatures and constraints from CMB and supernova data, ultimately finding it tightly limited and subdominant.

Contribution

It introduces a domain-wall dark energy model with anisotropic effects and assesses its viability against current cosmological observations.

Findings

CMB constraints limit domain wall energy density to less than 10^{-5} of critical density.

Combined CMB and SNe Ia data favor an isotropic universe with negligible domain wall contribution.

The model's anisotropic signatures are strongly constrained, making it a subdominant component in cosmic acceleration.

Abstract

We investigate a dark energy model driven by a planar domain-wall-like structure with a thickness comparable to, or larger than, the current Hubble radius, focusing on its intrinsic anisotropy and observational viability. Near the centre of the domain wall (DW), the spacetime is anisotropic, with distinct expansion rates parallel and perpendicular to the wall. This anisotropic structure induces direction-dependent cosmic expansion and modifies photon geodesics from cosmological sources, leaving characteristic signatures in cosmological observables. We confront the model with recent observational data. We first compute the anisotropic Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) temperature multipoles generated by the DW and impose constraints from the Planck 2018 measurements. These constraints severely limit the allowed DW abundance, requiring the DW energy density to be less than $\mathcal{O}(10^{-5})$ of the current critical density in order to suppress the quadrupole contributions. We then perform a Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) analysis using Type Ia supernova (SNe Ia) data, including the Pantheon+ SH0ES and DESY5 samples, to compare the DW scenario with the standard $\Lambda$CDM model. We find that although the DW naturally realises anisotropic accelerated expansion, the combined constraints from the CMB and SNe Ia favour the $\Lambda$CDM limit, in which the DW contribution is negligible, and the universe is effectively isotropic. Our results demonstrate that a Hubble-scale domain wall is tightly constrained by current observations and can only play a subdominant role in the late-time cosmic acceleration.