Confronting the IR Fixed Point Cosmology with High Redshift Observations

Abstract

We use high-redshift type Ia supernova and compact radio source data in order to test the infrared (IR) fixed point model of the late Universe which was proposed recently. It describes a cosmology with a time dependent cosmological constant and Newton constant whose dynamics arises from an underlying renormalization group flow near an IR-attractive fixed point. Without any finetuning or quintessence field it yields $\Omega_{\rm M}=\Omega_{\Lambda}=1/2$. Its characteristic $t^{4/3}$-dependence of the scale factor leads to a distance-redshift relation whose predictions are compared both to the supernova and to the radio source data. According to the $\chi^2$ test, the fixed point model reproduces the data at least as well as the best-fit (Friedmann-Robertson-Walker) standard cosmology.Furthermore, we extend the original fixed point model by assuming that the fixed point epoch is preceded by an era with constant $G$ and $\Lambda$. By means of a Monte Carlo simulation we show that the data expected from the forthcoming SNAP satellite mission could detect the transition to the fixed point regime provided it took place at a redshift of less than about 0.5.