Interacting models of soft coincidence

Abstract

The coincidence problem of late cosmic acceleration is a serious riddle in connection with our understanding of the evolution of the Universe. In this paper we show that an interaction between the dark energy component (either phantom or quintessence) and dark matter can alleviate it. In this scenario the baryon component is independently conserved. This generalizes a previous study [S. del Campo, R. Herrera, and D. Pav\'on, Phys. Rev. D 71, 123529 (2005).] in which neither baryons nor phantom energy were considered.