Monodromic Dark Energy

Abstract

Since the discovery of the accelerated expansion of the Universe, the constraints on the equation of state $w_\text{DE}$ of dark energy, the stress-energy component responsible for the acceleration, have tightened significantly. These constraints generally assume an equation of state that is slowly varying in time. We argue that there is good theoretical motivation to consider "monodromic" scenarios with periodic modulations of the dark energy potential. We provide a simple parametrization of such models, and show that these leave room for significant, periodic departures of $w_\text{DE}$ from -1. Moreover, simple models with non-standard kinetic term result in interesting large-scale structure phenomenology beyond that of standard slow-roll dark energy. All these scenarios are best constrained in a dedicated search, as current analyses average over relatively wide redshift ranges.