The Fate of the Universe: Dark Energy Dilution?

We study the possibility that dark energy decays in the future and the universe stops accelerating. The fact thatthe cosmological observations prefer an equation of state of dark energy smaller than -1 can be a signal that dark energy will decay in the future. This conclusion is based in interpreting a w<-1 as a signal of dark energy interaction with another fluid. We determine the interaction through the cosmological data and extrapolate it into the future. The resulting energy density for dark energy becomes rho=a^{-3(1+w)}e^{-\beta(a-1)}, i.e. it has an exponential suppression for a >> a_o=1. In this scenario the universe ends up dominated by this other fluid, which could be matter, and the universe stops accelerating at some time in the near future.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figure

Interacting Dark Energy: Decay into Fermions

A dark energy component is responsible for the present stage of acceleration of our universe. If no fine tuning is assumed on the dark energy potential then it will end up dominating the universe at late times and the universe will not stop this stage of acceleration. On the other hand, the equation of state of dark energy seems to be smaller than -1 as suggested by the cosmological data. We take this as an indication that dark energy does indeed interact with another fluid (we consider fermion fields) and we determine the interaction through the cosmological data and extrapolate it into the future. We study the conditions under which a dark energy can dilute faster or decay into the fermion fields. We show that it is possible to live now in an accelerating epoch dominated by the dark energy and without introducing any fine tuning parameters the dark energy can either dilute faster or decaying into fermions in the future. The acceleration of the universe will then cease.Comment: 10 page

Inflation from superstrings

We investigate the possibility of obtaining inflationary solutions of the slow roll type from a low energy Lagrangian coming from superstrings. The advantage of such an approach is that in these theories the scalar potential has only one free parameter (the Planck scale) and therefore no unnatural fine tuning may be accommodated. We find that in any viable scheme the dilaton and the moduli fields have to be stabilized and that before this happens, no other field may be used as the inflaton. Then inflation may occur due to chiral matter fields. Demanding that the potential terms associated with the chiral fields do not spoil the dilaton and moduli minimization leads to severe constraints on the magnitude of the density fluctuations.Comment: 22 pages, no figures, latex file We have corrected the magnitude of the density fluctuations, which become smaller than the COBE ones. Some references have also been added, and a few misprints correcte