Route to Lambda in conformally coupled phantom cosmology

Abstract

In this letter we investigate acceleration in the flat cosmological model with a conformally coupled phantom field and we show that acceleration is its generic feature. We reduce the dynamics of the model to a 3-dimensional dynamical system and analyze it on a invariant 2-dimensional submanifold. Then the concordance FRW model with the cosmological constant $\Lambda$ is a global attractor situated on a 2-dimensional invariant space. We also study the behaviour near this attractor, which can be approximated by the dynamics of the linearized part of the system. We demonstrate that trajectories of the conformally coupled phantom scalar field with a simple quadratic potential crosses the cosmological constant barrier infinitely many times in the phase space. The universal behaviour of the scalar field and its potential is also calculated. We conclude that the phantom scalar field conformally coupled to gravity gives a natural dynamical mechanism of concentration of the equation of state coefficient around the magical value $w_{\text{eff}}=-1$. We demonstrate route to Lambda through the infinite times crossing the $w_{\text{eff}}=-1$ phantom divide.