The fate of our universe is an unceasing topic of cosmology and the human being. The discovery of the current accelerated expansion of the universe significantly changed our view of the fate of the universe. Recently, some interesting scenarios concerning the fate of the universe attracted much attention in the community, namely the so-called “little rip” and “pseudo-rip”. It is worth noting that all the big rip, little rip and pseudo-rip arise from the assumption that the dark energy density $\rho (a)$ is monotonically increasing. In the present work, we are interested to investigate what will happen if this assumption is broken, and then propose a so-called “quasi-rip” scenario, which is driven by a type of quintom dark energy. In this work, we consider an explicit model of quasi-rip in detail. We show that quasi-rip has an unique feature different from big rip, little rip and pseudo-rip. Our universe has a chance to be rebuilt from the ashes after the terrible rip. This might be the last hope in the “hopeless” rip.

• Received 12 July 2012

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.86.083003