2008/02/29 by Miguel Quartin, Mauricio O. Calvao, Sergio E. Joras +2 · 2 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #astro-ph #gr-qc
paper · pdf · doi:10.1088/1475-7516/2008/05/007
published as JCAP 0805:007,2008 · 13 pages, 9 figures, accepted for publication in JCAP. Minor corrections, one figure replaced, references added
arxiv created 2008/04/08 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01
Cosmological models involving an interaction between dark matter and dark energy have been proposed in order to solve the so-called coincidence problem. Different forms of coupling have been studied, but there have been claims that observational data seem to narrow (some of) them down to something annoyingly close to the ΛCDM model, thus greatly reducing their ability to deal with the problem in the first place. The smallness problem of the initial energy density of dark energy has also been a target of cosmological models in recent years. Making use of a moderately general coupling scheme, this paper aims to unite these different approaches and shed some light as to whether this class of models has any true perspective in suppressing the aforementioned issues that plague our current understanding of the universe, in a quantitative and unambiguous way.