Natural quintessence?

We formulate conditions for the naturalness of cosmological quintessence scenarios. The quintessence Lagrangian is taken to be the sum of a simple exponential potential and a non-canonical kinetic term. This parameterization covers most variants of quintessence and makes the naturalness conditions particularly transparent. Several “natural” scalar models lead, for the present cosmological era, to a large fraction of homogeneous dark energy density and an acceleration of the scale factor as suggested by observation.