Alternative dark energy models: an overview

A large number of recent observational data strongly suggest that we live in a flat, accelerating Universe composed of ~ 1/3 of matter (baryonic + dark) and ~ 2/3 of an exotic component with large negative pressure, usually named Dark Energy or Quintessence. The basic set of experiments includes: observations from SNe Ia, CMB anisotropies, large scale structure, X-ray data from galaxy clusters, age estimates of globular clusters and old high redshift galaxies (OHRG's). It is now widely believed that such results provide the remaining piece of information connecting the inflationary flatness pr...