Paper detail

Quintessence and (Anti-)Chaplygin Gas in Loop Quantum Cosmology

The concordance model of cosmology contains several unknown components such as dark matter and dark energy. Many proposals have been made to describe them by choosing an appropriate potential for a scalar field. We study four models in the realm of loop quantum cosmology (LQC): the Chaplygin gas, an inflationary and radiation-like potential, quintessence and an anti-Chaplygin gas. For the latter we show that all trajectories start and end with a type II singularity and, depending on the inital value, may go through a bounce. On the other hand the evolution under the influence of the first three scalar fields behaves classically at times far away from the big bang singularity and bounces as the energy density approaches the critical density.