On the fate of the phantom dark energy universe in semiclassical gravity II: Scalar phantom fields

Abstract

Quantum corrections coming from massless fields conformally coupled with gravity are studied, in order to see if they can lead to avoidance of the annoying Big Rip singularity which shows up in a flat Friedmann-Robertson-Walker universe filled with dark energy and modeled by a scalar phantom field. The dynamics of the model are discussed for all values of the two parameters, named $\alpha>0$ and $\beta<0$, corresponding to the regularization process. The new results are compared with the ones obtained in \cite{hae11} previously, where dark energy was modeled by means of a phantom fluid with equation of state $P=\omega\rho$, with $\omega<-1$.