Nonminimal quintessence and phantom with nearly flat potentials

We investigate quintessence and phantom dark-energy scenarios, in which the scalar fields evolve in nearly flat potentials and are nonminimally coupled to gravity. We show that all such models converge to a common behavior and we provide the corresponding approximate analytical expressions for w (_) and w (a). We find that nonminimal coupling leads to richer cosmological behavior compared to its minimal counterpart. In addition, comparison with baryon acoustic oscillation and the latest supernovae data reveals that agreement can be established more easily and with less strict constraints on the model parameters.