Dark energy, the swampland, and the equivalence principle

Abstract

It has recently been argued that string theory does not admit de Sitter vacua. This would imply that the current accelerated expansion of the universe is not driven by a cosmological constant (or vacuum energy) but by other means such as a quintessential scalar field. Such a scalar field is in general expected to couple to at least some matter species, such as dark matter. Cosmological observations already constrain such dark matter couplings strongly. We argue that there are a number of interesting scenarios to be explored, such as coupling functions which possess a minimum at finite field values. In these theories, the effective gravitational coupling between dark matter particles grows with time and are consistent with observations of the anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background radiation and large scale structures. We argue that such couplings might also help to alleviate the tension between the swampland conjectures and the properties of the quintessential potential. Observational signatures of violations of the equivalence principle in the dark sector are expected in the non-linear regime on intermediate or small scales.