Electromagnetic plasma waves in dark energy cosmology

Abstract

We explore the electromagnetic wave modes that can exist in a cosmological plasma dominated by dark energy due to a cosmological constant. It is found that, in the cold and hot plasma cases, electromagnetic plasma wave modes can be found exactly. The effect of this cosmology appears as a time-dependent potential in the wave equation for the electromagnetic modes, which effectively modifies the frequency response of the plasma. This potential depends on the metric of the spacetime and on the thermodynamical properties of the plasma. For both cases, cold and hot, the solutions are found in terms of Airy and Bessel functions, respectively. When those solutions are required to have vanishing initial conditions, a discretization on the wavelengths of the electromagnetic plasma waves is imposed. Thus, only some specific wave modes can exist in this dark energy cosmology. Relaxing those conditions, we obtain other solutions that approximate to plane waves only in the very hot plasma limit.