Hessence: A new view of quintom dark energy

Recently a lot of attention has been given to building a dark energy model in which the equation-of-state parameter w can cross the phantom divide w ≤ -1. One of the models to realize crossing the phantom divide is called the quintom model, in which two real scalar fields appear, one is a normal scalar field and the other is a phantom-type scalar field. In this paper we propose a non-canonical complex scalar field as the dark energy, which we dub 'hessence', to implement crossing the phantom divide, in a similar sense as the quintom dark energy model. In the hessence model, the dark energy is described by a single field with an internal degree of freedom rather than two independent real scalar fields. However, the hessence is different from an ordinary complex scalar field, we show that the hessence can avoid the difficulty of the Q-ball formation which gives trouble to the spintessence model (an ordinary complex scalar field acts as the dark energy). Furthermore, we find that, by choosing a proper potential, the hessence could correspond to a Chaplygin gas at late times.