No Arabic abstract
We consider theories in which there exists a nontrivial coupling between the dark matter sector and the sector responsible for the acceleration of the universe. Such theories can possess an adiabatic regime in which the quintessence field always sits at the minimum of its effective potential, which is set by the local dark matter density. We show that if the coupling strength is much larger than gravitational, then the adiabatic regime is always subject to an instability. The instability, which can also be thought of as a type of Jeans instability, is characterized by a negative sound speed squared of an effective coupled dark matter/dark energy fluid, and results in the exponential growth of small scale modes. We discuss the role of the instability in specific coupled CDM and Mass Varying Neutrino (MaVaN) models of dark energy, and clarify for these theories the regimes in which the instability can be evaded due to non-adiabaticity or weak coupling.
We present three distinct types of models of dark energy in the form of a scalar field which is explicitly coupled to dark matter. Our construction draws from the pull-back formalism for fluids and generalises the fluid action to involve couplings to the scalar field. We investigate the cosmology of each class of model both at the background and linearly perturbed level. We choose a potential for the scalar field and a specific coupling function for each class of models and we compute the Cosmic Microwave Background and matter power spectra.
It has been recently pointed out that coupled dark matter-dark energy systems suffer from non-adiabatic instabilities at early times and large scales. We show how coupled models free from non-adiabatic instabilities can be identified as a function of a generic coupling Q and of the dark energy equation of state w. In our analysis, we do not refer to any particular cosmic field. We also confront a viable class of model in which the interaction is directly proportional to the dark energy density to recent cosmological data. In that framework, we show the correlations between the dark coupling and several cosmological parameters allowing to e.g.larger neutrino mass than in uncoupled models.
Non-minimally coupled scalar field models suffer of unstable growing modes at the linear perturbation level. The nature of these instabilities depends on the dynamical state of the scalar field. In particular in systems which admit adiabatic solutions, large scale instabilities are suppressed by the slow-roll dynamics of the field. Here we review these results and present a preliminary likelihood data analysis suggesting that along adiabatic solutions coupled models with coupling of order of gravitational strength can provide viable cosmological scenarios satisfying constraints from SN Ia, CMB and large scale structure data.
We study the evolution of linear density perturbations in the context of interacting scalar field-dark matter cosmologies, where the presence of the coupling acts as a stabilization mechanism for the runaway behavior of the scalar self-interaction potential as in the case of the Chameleon model. We show that in the adiabatic background regime of the system the rise of unstable growing modes of the perturbations is suppressed by the slow-roll dynamics of the field. Furthermore the coupled system behaves as an inhomogeneous adiabatic fluid. In contrast instabilities may develop for large values of the coupling constant, or along non-adiabatic solutions, characterized by a period of high-frequency dumped oscillations of the scalar field. In the latter case the dynamical instabilities of the field fluctuations, which are typical of oscillatory scalar field regimes, are amplified and transmitted by the coupling to dark matter perturbations.
We evaluate the mass function of virialized halos, by using Press & Schechter (PS) and/or Steth & Tormen (ST) expressions, for cosmologies where Dark Energy (DE) is due to a scalar self-interacting field, coupled with Dark Matter (DM). We keep to coupled DE (cDE) models known to fit linear observables. To implement the PS-ST approach, we start from reviewing and extending the results of a previous work on the growth of a spherical top-hat fluctuation in cDE models, confirming their most intriguing astrophysical feature, i.e. a significant baryon-DM segregation, occurring well before the onset of any hydrodynamical effect. Accordingly, the predicted mass function depends on how halo masses are measured. For any option, however, the coupling causes a distortion of the mass function, still at z=0. Furthermore, the z-dependence of cDE mass functions is mostly displaced, in respect to LambdaCDM, in the opposite way of uncoupled dynamical DE. This is an aspect of the basic underlying result, that even a little DM-DE coupling induces relevant modifications in the non-linear evolution. Therefore, without causing great shifts in linear astrophysical observables, the DM-baryon segregation induced by the coupling can have an impact on a number of cosmological problems, it e.g., galaxy satellite abundance, spiral disk formation, apparent baryon shortage, entropy input in clusters, etc..