Cosmological scalar fields that mimic the ΛCDM cosmological model

Abstract

We look for cosmologies with a scalar field (dark energy without cosmological constant), which mimic the standard ΛCDM cosmological model yielding exactly the same large-scale geometry described by the evolution of the Hubble parameter (i.e. photometric distance and angular diameter distance as functions on z). Asymptotic behavior of the field solutions is studied in the case of spatially flat Universe with pressureless matter and separable scalar field Lagrangians; the cases of power-law kinetic term and power-law potential are considered. Exact analytic solutions are found in some special cases. A number of models have the field solutions with infinite behavior in the past or even singular behavior at finite redshifts. We point out that introduction of the cosmological scalar field involves some degeneracy leading to lower precision in determination of Ω m . To remove this degeneracy additional information is needed besides the data on large-scale geometry.