Late-time attractors and cosmic acceleration

Abstract: We prove the conditions under which scaling cosmologies are inevitable late-time attractors of multi-field multi-exponential potentials, independently of initial conditions. The advantage of such scaling cosmologies is that the time dependence of the fields and of the scale factor is known analytically, thus allowing late-time observables to be determined exactly. Expanding the earlier results of ref. arXiv:hep-th/2303.03418, here we continue the program of analytically characterizing the late-time behavior of cosmological solutions. Our results are general in that they are derived without relying on any approximation nor are they based on any assumption on the sources of the potential, such as their higher-dimensional or string-theoretic origin. We point out a number of model-independent features that follow from our analytic results, including a convex-hull criterion for cosmic acceleration. When applied to string theory, our analytic knowledge of late-time cosmological solutions enables us to single out potentials that can describe an accelerating universe from those which cannot and to quantitatively test several conjectured Swampland criteria.