Can brane dark energy model be probed observationally by distant supernovae?

The recent astronomical measurements of distant supernovae as well as other observations indicate that our Universe is presently accelerating. There are different proposals for the explanation of this acceleration, such as the cosmological constant Λ, decaying vacuum energy, an evolving scalar field (quintessence), phantom energy, etc. Most of these proposals require the existence of exotic matter with negative pressure violating the strong energy condition. On the other hand, there have appeared many models which offer dramatically different mechanisms for the current acceleration, in which dark energy emerges from the gravity sector rather than from the matter sector. In this Letter, we compare the concordance ΛCDM model with the Sahni-Shtanov brane-world models of dark energy by using the Akaike and Bayesian information criteria. We show that new parameters in the brane model are not statistically significant in terms of the information criteria, although the best fit method gives an improved fit to the SNIa data, because of the additional parameters. This is because the information criteria of model selection compensate for this advantage by penalizing models having more free parameters. We conclude that only new future observational data are accurate enough to give an advantage to dark-energy models of the brane origin, i.e., a very high-significance detection is required to justify the presence of new parameters. In our statistical analysis both Riess et al.'s and Astier et al.'s SNIa samples are used. For stringent constraining parameters of the models the baryon oscillation peak (BOP) test is used.