Quintessence: A Review

Understand

Quintessence is a canonical scalar field introduced to explain the late-time cosmic acceleration.

• The cosmological dynamics of quintessence is reviewed, paying particular attention to the evolution of the dark energy equation of state w.
• For the field potentials having tracking and thawing properties, the evolution of w can be known analytically in terms of a few model parameters.
• Using the analytic expression of w, we constrain quintessence models from the observations of supernovae type Ia, cosmic microwave background, and baryon acoustic oscillations.