Phenomenological aspects of dark energy dominated cosmologies

Contents......Page 2
Introduction......Page 8
The dark side of the Universe......Page 13
A historical introduction......Page 14
Standard cosmology......Page 15
CMB anisotropies......Page 17
Clustering of matter......Page 19
Supernovae Ia and luminosity distance measurements......Page 20
Cosmic complementarity......Page 22
Vacuum energy......Page 24
Anthropic solutions......Page 26
Quintessence......Page 27
Scalar field dynamics......Page 28
Quintessential problems......Page 29
Exponential Times Inverse Power Law potential......Page 33
Two Exponential potential......Page 34
Quintessence perturbations in Newtonian gauge......Page 36
Analytical solution in the tracker regime......Page 38
Numerical analysis......Page 40
Upper bounds on the cosmic equation of state......Page 44
Parameterized quintessence potential......Page 47
CMB peaks......Page 48
Constraints from supernovae......Page 50
Constraints from Doppler peaks and Sn Ia......Page 51
Discussion......Page 55
The effective equation of state......Page 57
Cosmological distance fitting functions......Page 59
Statefinder method......Page 61
Low redshift parameterization......Page 62
An exact parameterization for the dark energy equation of state......Page 64
Dark energy effects in the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation......Page 71
Basic equations......Page 72
CMB anisotropies......Page 75
Dark energy and the Integrated Sachs-Wolfe effect......Page 79
Differentiating dark energy models with CMB measurements......Page 82
Testing dark energy with ideal CMB experiments......Page 86
Alternative cosmological test with higher order statistics......Page 89
Higher order statistics......Page 90
Frequentist approach and estimation of higher moments......Page 91
Modelling localized non-Gaussian anisotropies......Page 95
Conclusion and prospects......Page 98
Bibliography......Page 100