Confronting quintessence models with recent high-redshift supernovae data

Abstract

We confront the predictions of different quintessence models with recent measurements of the luminosity distance from two sets of supernovae type Ia. In particular, we consider the 157 SNe Ia in the Gold dataset with z<1.7, and the more recent data containing 71 supernovae obtained by the Supernova Legacy Survey (SNLS) with z<1. We numerically solve the evolution equations for the Ratra-Peebles inverse power law model, the double exponential and the hyperbolic cosine quintessence models. We obtain confidence regions from the two datasets in the \Omega_M-\alpha and \Omega_M-w_\phi planes for the different models and compare their predictions with dark energy models with constant equation of state.