Reinterpreting dark energy through backreaction: the minimally coupled morphon field

Abstract

In the context of averaged cosmologies, the effective equations can be written in the form of "regional" Friedmannian equations with additional sources arising from the so-called backreaction of inhomogeneities. We propose a mean field description of this backreaction in terms of a regionally homogeneous scalar field: this provides a physical motivation to the phenomenological scalar fields generically called quintessence fields. We explicitly reconstruct the potential of the scalar field for a one-parameter family of scaling solutions to the backreaction problem, showing that it entails most of the standard scalar fields including e.g. standard and phantom quintessence scenarii.