Cosmological models in scalar tensor theories of gravity and observations: a class of general solutions

We consider cosmological models in scalar tensor theories of gravity that describe an accelerating universe, and we study a family of inverse power law potentials, for which exact solutions of the Einstein equations are known. We also compare theoretical predictions of our models with observations. For this we use the following data: the publicly available catalogs of type Ia supernovae and high redshift Gamma Ray Bursts, the parameters of large scale structure determined by the 2-degree Field Galaxy Redshift Survey (2dFGRS), and measurements of cosmological distances based on the Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effect, among others.