Dear Colleagues,

The current understanding of the universe expansion history is based on the six-parameters minimal ΛCDM model. Although appealing and well-consolidated for its experimental guidance, the model shows strong discrepancies between quantum expectations and cosmic observations. Cosmologists believe that the ΛCDM model could be incomplete, even because the dark contributions (dark energy and dark matter) are dominant and drive the universe dynamics. If the ΛCDM model is not the final paradigm of the whole dynamics, which extensions or modifications are expected to reproduce cosmic data?

Even though alternative paradigms, spanning from barotropic dark energy models up to extended theories of gravity, have been widely explored, recent Planck observations confirm that the ΛCDM model is the best candidate for describing the large-scale universe. However, inflation seems to be modeled by means of the simplest correction to the Einstein–Hilbert action, i.e., the Starobinsky inflationary paradigm. In other words, a complete and self-consistent final paradigm to describe the universe has not so far been formulated and likely should unify the late-time acceleration with all previous cosmic phases, e.g., inflation, reheating, baryogenesis, and so forth.

The main purpose of this Special Issue is to face the idea of “dark cosmology” by proposing alternative treatments to the ΛCDM model, which relate theoretical considerations with observations; in other words, alternative scenarios which consider Λ as interchangeable with other possibilities, passing through phenomenological dark energy constructions, up to alternative frameworks based on modified gravity. Although we embrace several scenarios, which consider different epochs of the universe’s evolution, we strongly encourage those works which make use of observations and numerical constraints. Therefore, we warmly welcome manuscripts based on the interplay between theory and experiments in subjects like dark energy, dark matter, small perturbations, early time cosmology, quantum gravity, extended theories of gravity, etc.

Dr. Orlando Luongo
Dr. Hernando Quevedo
Guest Editors

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• dark energy
• dark matter
• inflation
• missing baryon problem
• extended theories of gravity