Old dark energy

Abstract

Dark energy dynamics in the recent universe is influenced by its evolution through the long, matter-dominated expansion history. A particular dynamical property, the flow variable, remains constant in several classes of scalar field models as long as matter dominates; the dark energy is only free to change this behavior at recent times. This gives natural initial conditions for Monte Carlo studies of dark energy dynamics. We propose a parametrization for the later evolution that covers a wide range of possible behaviors, is tractable in making predictions, and can be constrained by observations. We compare the approach to directly parametrizing the potential, which does not take into account the history of the dark energy dynamics. © 2010 The American Physical Society.