Dark energy dominance and cosmic acceleration in first-order formalism

The current accelerated universe could be produced by modified gravitational dynamics as it can be seen, in particular, in its Palatini formulation. We analyze here a specific nonlinear gravity-scalar system in the first-order Palatini formalism which leads to a Friedmann-Robertson-Walker cosmology different from the purely metric one. It is shown that the emerging Friedmann-Robertson-Walker cosmology may lead either to an effective quintessence phase (cosmic speed-up) or to an effective phantom phase. Moreover, the already known gravity assisted dark energy dominance occurs also in the first-order formalism. Finally, it is shown that a dynamical theory able to resolve the cosmological constant problem exists also in this formalism, in close parallel with the standard metric formulation.