The two most popular candidates for dark energy, i.e. a cosmological constant and quintessence, are very difficult to distinguish observationally, mostly because the quintessence field does not have sizable fluctuations. We study a scalar field model for dark energy in which the scalar field is invariant under reflection symmetry φ → −φ. Under general assumptions, there is a phase transition at...

In this work we perform some studies related to dark energy. Firstly, we propose a dynamical approach to explain the dark energy content of the universe. We assume that a massless scalar field couples to the Hubble parameter with some Planck-mass suppressed interactions. This scalar field developes a Hubble parameter-dependent (thus time-dependent) vacum expectation value, which renders a time-...

The cosmological concordance model contains two separate constituents which interact only gravitationally with themselves and everything else, the dark matter and the dark energy. In the standard dark energy models, the dark matter makes up some 20% of the total energy budget today, while the dark energy is responsible for about 75%. Here we show that these numbers are only robust for specific ...