Quintessence: a review

Quintessence is a canonical scalar field introduced to explain the late-time cosmic acceleration. The cosmological dynamics of quintessence is reviewed, paying particular attention to the evolution of the dark energy equation of state w. For the field potentials having tracking and thawing properties, the evolution of w can be known analytically in terms of a few model parameters. Using the analytic expression of w, we constrain quintessence models from the observations of supernovae type Ia, cosmic microwave background, and baryon acoustic oscillations. The tracking freezing models are hardly distinguishable from the LCDM model, whereas in thawing models the today's field equation of state is constrained to…