No Arabic abstract
We consider cosmologies in which a dark-energy scalar field interacts with cold dark matter. The growth of perturbations is followed beyond the linear level by means of the time-renormalization-group method, which is extended to describe a multi-component matter sector. Even in the absence of the extra interaction, a scale-dependent bias is generated as a consequence of the different initial conditions for baryons and dark matter after decoupling. The effect is enhanced significantly by the extra coupling and can be at the 2-3 percent level in the range of scales of baryonic acoustic oscillations. We compare our results with N-body simulations, finding very good agreement.
We study the behaviour of linear perturbations in multifield coupled quintessence models. Using gauge invariant linear cosmological perturbation theory we provide the full set of governing equations for this class of models, and solve the system numerically. We apply the numerical code to generate growth functions for various examples, and compare these both to the standard $Lambda$CDM model and to current and future observational bounds. Finally, we examine the applicability of the small scale approximation, often used to calculate growth functions in quintessence models, in light of upcoming experiments such as SKA and Euclid. We find the deviation of the full equation results for large k modes from the approximation exceeds the experimental uncertainty for these future surveys. The numerical code, PYESSENCE, written in Python will be publicly available.
We study models of quintessence consisting of a number of scalar fields coupled to several dark matter components. In the case of exponential potentials the scaling solutions can be described in terms of a single field. The corresponding effective logarithmic slope and effective coupling can be written in a simple form in terms of the individual slopes and couplings of the original fields. We also investigate solutions where the scalar potential is negligible, in particular those leading to transient matter dominated solutions. Finally, we compute the evolution equations for the linear perturbations which will allow these models to be tested against current and future observational data.
We study a coupled quintessence model in which the interaction with the dark matter sector is a function of the quintessence potential. Such a coupling can arise from a field dependent mass term for the dark matter field. The dynamical analysis of a standard quintessence potential coupled with the interaction explored here shows that the system possesses a late time accelerated attractor. In light of these results, we perform a fit to the most recent Supernovae Ia, Cosmic Microwave Background and Baryon Acoustic Oscillation data sets. Constraints arising from weak equivalence principle violation arguments are also discussed.
An interaction between dark matter and dark energy, proportional to the product of their energy densities, results in a scaling behavior of the ratio of these densities with respect to the scale factor of the Robertson-Walker metric. This gives rise to a class of cosmological models which deviate from the standard model in an analytically tractable way. In particular, it becomes possible to quantify the role of potential dark-energy perturbations. We investigate the impact of this interaction on the structure formation process. Using the (modified) CAMB code we obtain the CMB spectrum as well as the linear matter power spectrum. It is shown that the strong degeneracy in the parameter space present in the background analysis is considerably reduced by considering textit{Planck} data. Our analysis is compatible with the $Lambda$CDM model at the $2sigma$ confidence level with a slightly preferred direction of the energy flow from dark matter to dark energy.
We study structure formation in non-minimally coupled dark energy models, where there is a coupling in the Lagrangian between a quintessence scalar field and gravity via the Ricci scalar. We consider models with a range of different non-minimal coupling strengths and compare these to minimally coupled quintessence models with time-dependent dark energy densities. The equations of state of the latter are tuned to either reproduce the equation of state of the non-minimally coupled models or their background history. Thereby they provide a reference to study the unique imprints of coupling on structure formation. We show that the coupling between gravity and the scalar field, which effectively results in a time-varying gravitational constant G, is not negligible and its effect can be distinguished from a minimally coupled model. We extend previous work on this subject by showing that major differences appear in the determination of the mass function at high masses, where we observe differences of the order of 40% at z=0. Our new results concern effects on the non-linear matter power spectrum and on the lensing signal (differences of ~10% for both quantities), where we find that non-minimally coupled models could be distinguished from minimally coupled ones.