Cosmology of a scalar field coupled to matter and an isotropy-violating Maxwell field

Motivated by the couplings of the dilaton in four-dimensional effective actions, we investigate the cosmological consequences of a scalar field coupled both to matter and a Maxwell-type vector field. The vector field has a background isotropy-violating component. New anisotropic scaling solutions which can be responsible for the matter and dark energy dominated epochs are identified and explored. For a large parameter region the universe expands almost isotropically. Using that the CMB quadrupole is extremely sensitive to shear, we constrain the ratio of the matter coupling to the vector coupling to be less than 10(-5). Moreover, we identify a large parameter region, corresponding to a strong vector coupling regime, yielding exciting and viable cosmologies close to the Lambda CDM limit.