Branes: cosmological surprise and observational deception

TL;DR

This paper constrains various brane-inspired cosmological models using supernovae and CMB data, showing they often resemble standard dark energy models and are generally incompatible with certain universe behaviors like early loitering.

Contribution

It demonstrates that brane-inspired models can be effectively described by quintessence-like models and assesses their compatibility with observational data.

Findings

Transient acceleration and early loitering are usually excluded by data.

Brane models mimic a universe close to ΛCDM today.

The models are equivalent to certain quintessence/ghost dark energy models.

Abstract

Using some supernovae and CMB data, we constrain the Cardassian, Randall-Sundrum, and Dvali-Gabadadze-Porrati brane-inspired cosmological models. We show that a transient acceleration and an early loitering period are usually excluded by the data. Moreover, the three models are equivalent to some usual quintessence/ghost dark energy models defined by a barotropic index $\gamma_\phi$ depending on the redshift. We calculate this index for each model and show that they mimic a universe close to a $\Lambda CDM$ model today.