Dark energy, with Signatures

New paper! This was selected for Honorable Mention in the 2010 Gravity Research Foundation Essay awards.

Dark Energy, with Signatures

http://arxiv.org/abs/1005.3038

Sourish Dutta, Stephen D. H. Hsu, Robert J. Scherrer


We propose a class of simple dark energy models which predict a late-time dark radiation component and a distinctive time-dependent equation of state $w(z)$ for redshift $z < 3$. The dark energy field can be coupled strongly enough to Standard Model particles to be detected in colliders, and the model requires only modest additional particle content and little or no fine-tuning other than a new energy scale of order milli-electron volts.