Abstract. We present a new interpretation of dark energy in terms of an Abnormally Weighting Energy (AWE). This means that dark energy does not couple to gravitation in the same way as ordinary matter, yielding a violation of the weak and strong equivalence principles on cosmological scales. The resulting cosmological mechanism accounts for the Hubble diagram of type Ia supernovae in terms of both cosmic acceleration and variation of the gravitational constant while still accounting for the present tests of general relativity. This explanation allows to build dark energy models (i) without violation of the strong energy condition p < −ρc 2 /3 (ii) with non-negligible direct couplings to gravitation and (iii) natural convergence mechanism toward general relativity.
Motivations for an abnormally weighting energyMaybe the most helpful astrophysical evidence for determining the nature of dark energy is the dimmed magnitude of type Ia supernovae (see Astier et al. 2006 and references therein). This tell us that either the recent cosmic expansion has accelerated or (and) these objects are not standard candles, which could have happened if, for instance, fundamental constants of physics have recently varied. This is the first explanation that is retained in the so-called concordance model ΛCDM in which a positive cosmological constant constitutes the dark energy sector of cosmology. This convenient explanation does not require to give up neither general relativity (GR) nor the cosmological principle and furthermore allows to account for dark energy effects with only one additional parameter. However, the cosmological constant is usually interpreted as the stress-energy term associated to the vacuum state which has non-vanishing energy due to quantum fluctuations. Doing so, one recovers the old problem of the overestimation of the cosmological constant. Indeed, if one assumes that the cut-off energy scale at which GR is no longer valid is the Planck length, then the vacuum energy density acting as a cosmological constant is ρ Λ ≈ m 4 P l ≈ 10 76 GeV 4 (in geometrical units whereh = c = 1, G = m −2 P l ). Which mechanism can be so precise to make such a huge quantity vanishing? This constitutes the so-called fine-tuning problem of the cosmological constant. What is worst now with the astrophysical evidences for the cosmological constant, is that the vacuum energy density is indeed not vanishing but is of cosmological order of magnitude:We have therefore a huge disagreement between theory and experiment of more than 120 orders of magnitude! Why is the vacuum energy density, something that should be set once for all in the universe and should depend on quantum mechanics, is of the order of the critical density today? Such a value suggests a cosmological mechanism behind the value of the cosmological constant... Even worst, this means that we live in a very particular epoch in the history of the universe : the time when the cosmological constant, whose value has a priori nothing to do with cosmology if it is fixed by quantu...