Cosmological Evolution of a Tachyon-Quintom Model of Dark
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Cosmological Evolution of a Tachyon-Quintom Model of Dark Energy Shang-Gang Shi1, Yun-Song Piao1 and Cong-Feng Qiao1,2 1College of Physical Sciences,Graduate University of CAS, YuQuan Road 19A, Beijing 100049, China 2Theoretical Physics Center for Science Facilities (TPCSF), CAS., Beijing 100049, China Abstract In this work we study the cosmological evolution of a dark energy model with two scalar fields, i.e. the tachyon and the phantom tachyon. This model enables the equation of state w to change from w > 1 to w < 1 in the evolution of the universe. The phase-space − − analysis for such a system with inverse square potentials shows that there exists a unique stable critical point, which has power-law solutions. In this paper, we also study another form of tachyon-quintom model with two fields, which voluntarily involves the interactions between both fields. arXiv:0812.4022v2 [astro-ph] 7 Mar 2009 1 I. INTRODUCTION Recent observational data [1, 2, 3] strongly indicate that the Universe is spatially flat and accelerating at the present time. Within the framework of general relativity, cosmic acceleration can be sourced by an energy-momentum tensor which has a large negative pressure called dark energy (See Ref. [4] for a recent review). The simplest candidate for dark energy seems to be a small positive cosmological constant, but it suffers from difficulties associated with the fine tuning and coincidence problem. This problem can be alleviated in models of dynamically evolving dark energy called quintessence [5], which have tracker like properties where the energy density in the fields track those of the background energy density before dominating today. The phantom, whose kinetic energy term has the reverse sign, has been also proposed as a candidate of dynamical dark energy [6]. There has been the enormous variety of DE models suggested in the literature, see Ref. [7] for reviews. The analysis of the properties of dark energy from recent observations mildly favor models with ω crossing 1 in the near past [8, 9]. But, neither quintessence nor phantom can fulfill − this transition. The quintom scenario of dark energy is designed to understand the nature of dark energy with ω across 1. The first model of quintom scenario of dark energy is given − in Ref. [9] with two scalar fields, where one is quintessence and the other is phantom. This model has been studied in detail later on [10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15], and recently a new type of quintom model inspired by the string theory has also been proposed, which only have a single scalar field [16]. The role of the rolling tachyon [17] in string theory has been widely studied in cos- mology, see Refs.[18, 19], and especially Refs.[20, 21, 22, 23] for dark energy. Some sort of tachyon condensate may described by effective field theory with a Lagrangian density = V (φ) 1+ gµν∂ φ∂ φ. It can act as a source of dark matter or inflation field. Mean- L − µ ν while the tachyonp can also act as a source of dark energy depending upon the form of the tachyon potential. However, as compared to canonical quintessence, tachyon models require more fine-tuning to agree with observations. In Ref. [24], the authors consider the Born- Infeld type Lagrangian with negative kinetic energy term. The Lagrangian density they choose is = V (ϕ) 1 gµν∂ ϕ∂ ϕ. It is clear that for the spatially homogeneous scalar L − − µ ν field, the equation ofp state ω = 1 ϕ˙ 2 will be less than 1 unless the kinetic energy term − − − ϕ˙ 2 = 0. This field is called phantom tachyon, see for example [25]. In principle, we can consider the multi-fields model including multiple tachyon and mul- tiple phantom tachyon. However, without loss of generality, we only consider the case of one tachyon and one phantom tachyon, since it is the simplest one to realize that the equation of state w cross 1 during the evolution of the universe and it shows most of the central ideas − of such model. Because of the quintom-like behavior it shows, we call it tachyon-quintom for the convenience. This paper is organized as follows: in section II we study in detail the tachyon-quintom model with inverse square potentials. The numerical analysis shows this model is not sensitive to the initial kinetic energy density of tachyon and phantom tachyon, and we give the reason in detail. Then the phase-space analysis of the spatially flat FRW models shows that there exist a unique stable critical point, and we compare it 2 with tachyon model; in section III we present another two-field model which include the interaction between two fields; the section IV is summary. II. THE TACHYON-QUINTOM MODEL A. The tachyon-quintom model We assume a four-dimensional, spatially-flat Friedmann-Robertson-Walker Universe filled by a homogeneous tachyon φ with potential V (φ), a homogeneous phantom tachyon ϕ with potential V (ϕ) and a fluid with barotropic equation of state p =(γ 1)ρ ,0 <γ 2, such γ − γ ≤ as radiation (γ =4/3)or dust matter (γ = 1). In this section, we turn our attention to the possibility of the tachyon and phantom tachyon as a source of the dark energy. The action for such a system is given by 2 4 Mp S = d x√ g R + φ + ϕ + m (1) Z − 2 L L L where M is the reduced Planck mass, is the scalar curvature, represents the p R Lm Lagrangian density of matter fields and = V (φ) 1+ gµν∂ φ∂ φ (2) Lφ − µ ν p = V (ϕ) 1 gµν∂ ϕ∂ ϕ. (3) Lϕ − − µ ν p We now restrict to spatially homogeneous time dependent solutions for which ∂iφ = ∂iϕ = 0. Thus the energy densities and the pressure of the field φ and ϕ are given, respectively, by V (φ) ρ = , p = V (φ) 1 φ˙2, (4) φ φ − − 1 φ˙2 q q − V (ϕ) 2 ρϕ = , pϕ = V (ϕ) 1 +ϕ ˙ (5) 2 1 +ϕ ˙ − p p Here a dot is derivation with respect to synchronous time. The background equations of motion are φ¨ 1 dV (φ) +3Hφ˙ + =0 (6) 1 φ˙2 V (φ) dφ − ϕ¨ 1 dV (ϕ) +3Hϕ˙ =0 (7) 1 +ϕ ˙ 2 − V (ϕ) dϕ ρ˙ = 3γHρ (8) γ − γ 1 H˙ = 2 (ρφ + pφ + ρϕ + pϕ + ργ + pγ ) − 2Mp 2 2 (9) 1 φ˙ V (φ) ϕ˙ V (ϕ) = 2 + γργ 2Mp √1 φ˙2 √1+ϕ ˙ 2 − − − 3 together with a constraint equation for the Hubble parameter: 2 1 V (φ) V (ϕ) H = + + ργ (10) 3M 2 2 p 1 φ˙2 1 +ϕ ˙ q − p The potentials we considered are inverse square potentials: 2 2 2 2 V (φ)= Mφ φ− , V (ϕ)= Mϕϕ− (11) Those potentials allow constructing a autonomous system [26, 27] using the evolution equations, and give power-law solutions. The cosmological dynamics of the tachyon field with inverse square potential was studied in Ref. [20, 22, 23]. Interestingly, the inverse square potential plays the same role for tachyon fields as the exponential potential does for standard scalar fields. We define the following dimensionless quantities : ˙ V (φ) V (ϕ) ργ xφ φ, yφ 2 2 , xϕ ϕ,˙ yϕ 2 2 , z 2 2 (12) ≡ ≡ 3H Mp ≡ ≡ 3H Mp ≡ 3H Mp Now the Eqs. (10) and (9) can be rewrite as follow: y y 1= φ + ϕ + z Ω + z (13) 2 DE 2 1+ xϕ ≡ 1 xφ q − p 2 2 H 3 yφ(γ x ) yϕ(γ + x ) ′ = − φ ϕ + γ (14) 2 H −2 − 2 − 1+ xϕ 1 xφ q − p where ΩDE measure the dark energy density as a fraction of the critical density, a prime denotes a derivative with respect to the logarithm of the scale factor,N = ln a. Then the evolution Eqs. (6) and (7) can be written to an autonomous system: 2 x′ = 3(x β y )(1 x ) (15) φ − φ − φ φ − φ p 2 2 yφ(γ xφ) yϕ(γ + xϕ) y′ =3y − β y x + γ (16) φ φ 2 φ φ φ − 2 − 1+ xϕ − 1 xφ p q − p 2 x′ = 3(x + β y )(1 + x ) (17) ϕ − ϕ ϕ ϕ ϕ p 2 2 yφ(γ xφ) yϕ(γ + xϕ) y′ =3y − β y x + γ (18) ϕ ϕ 2 ϕ ϕ ϕ − 2 − 1+ xϕ − 1 xφ p q − p where 2 2 4Mp 4Mp βφ = 2 , βϕ = 2 (19) 3Mφ 3Mϕ The equation of state of the dark energy is 2 2 2 2 V (φ) 1 φ˙ V (ϕ) 1 +ϕ ˙ yφ 1 xφ yϕ 1+ xϕ ω = − q − − = − q − − (20) V (φ) V (ϕ) p yφ yϕp 2 + 2 2 + 2 1 x √1 φ˙ √1+ϕ ˙ √ φ √1+xϕ − − 4 -8 -6 -4 -2 0 -8 -6 -4 -2 0 0.8 0.8 0.0 0.0 0.7 0.7 a a a b -0.2 b -0.2 0.6 0.6 c c 0.5 0.5 -0.4 -0.4 0.4 0.4 -0.6 -0.6 w DE 0.3 0.3 -0.8 -0.8 0.2 0.2 b 0.1 0.1 -1.0 -1.0 c 0.0 0.0 -1.2 -1.2 -0.1 -0.1 -8 -6 -4 -2 0 -8 -6 -4 -2 0 N N FIG. 1: Evolution of the equation of state (ω)and density parameters(ΩDE) as a function of N for the dark energy model with β = β = 1/3, γ = 1.