Paper detail

Do Observations Favour Galileon Over Quintessence?

We study the Galileon scalar field model arising as a decoupling limit of the Dvali-Gababdaze-Porrati (DGP) construction for the late time acceleration of the universe. The model has one extra Galileon correction term over and above the standard kinetic and potential energy terms for a canonical quintessence field. We aim to study whether the current observational data can distinguish between this Galileon field and the quintessence field. Our study shows the remarkable result that for potentials like linear, square or exponential, the data prefers the Galileon model over quintessence field. It confirms that the observable universe demands the inclusion of higher derivative Galileon corrections in the standard quintessence scalar field models.