Dark energy The day the universe froze

Ran across this today on physics news and thought i would post it here it seems to be a testable theory of dark matter that could answer alot of questions

Imagine a time when the entire universe froze. According to a new model for dark energy, that is essentially what happened about 11.5 billion years ago, when the universe was a quarter of the size it is today.

The model, published online May 6 in the journal Physical Review D, was developed by Research Associate Sourish Dutta and Professor of Physics Robert Scherrer at Vanderbilt University, working with Professor of Physics Stephen Hsu and graduate student David Reeb at the University of Oregon.

A cosmological phase transition - similar to freezing - is one of the distinctive aspects of this latest effort to account for dark energy - the mysterious negative force that cosmologists now think makes up more than 70 percent of all the energy and matter in the universe and is pushing the universe apart at an ever-faster rate.

Another feature that distinguishes the new formulation is that it makes a testable prediction regarding the expansion rate of the universe. In addition, the micro-explosions created by the largest particle colliders should excite the dark energy field and these excitations could appear as exotic, never-seen-before sub-atomic particles.

"One of the things that is very unsatisfying about many of the existing explanations for dark energy is that they are difficult to test," says Scherrer, "We designed a model that can interact with normal matter and so has observable consequences."

this is exciting news to me. . . .

The theory is one of those that attribute dark energy to an entirely new field dubbed quintessence. Quintessence is comparable to other basic fields like gravity and electromagnetism, but has some unique properties. For one thing, it is the same strength throughout the universe. Another important feature is that it acts like an antigravity agent, causing objects to move away from each other instead of pulling them together like gravity.

an entirely new force to attribute the expansion of the universe to known as quintessence

One of the consequences of allowing quintessence to interact with ordinary matter is the likelihood that the field went through a phase transition - froze out - when the universe cooled down to a temperature that it reached 2.2 billion years after the Big Bang. As a result, the energy density of the quintessence field would have remained at a relatively high level until the phase transition when it abruptly dropped to a significantly lower level where it has remained ever since.

intriguing to say the least

That is very intersting. Ever since i have first read about this dark energy I have been intrigued. I think that is amazing that ALL the energy is the same and, one more question, i wonder why the energy has stayed at the same temperature ever since the freeze? I can think of an explanation for this. Good find!!