No Arabic abstract
We study cosmological models involving scalar fields coupled to radiation and discuss their effect on the redshift evolution of the cosmic microwave background temperature, focusing on links with varying fundamental constants and dynamical dark energy. We quantify how allowing for the coupling of scalar fields to photons, and its important effect on luminosity distances, weakens current and future constraints on cosmological parameters. In particular, for evolving dark energy models, joint constraints on the dark energy equation of state combining BAO radial distance and SN luminosity distance determinations, will be strongly dominated by BAO. Thus, to fully exploit future SN data one must also independently constrain photon number non-conservation arising from the possible coupling of SN photons to the dark energy scalar field. We discuss how observational determinations of the background temperature at different redshifts can, in combination with distance measures data, set tight constraints on interactions between scalar fields and photons, thus breaking this degeneracy. We also discuss prospects for future improvements, particularly in the context of Euclid and the E-ELT and show that Euclid can, even on its own, provide useful dark energy constraints while allowing for photon number non-conservation.
We consider a scenario where dark energy and baryons are dynamically coupled without any energy transfer. In this scenario, the background cosmology is unaffected and, at the perturbations level, the coupling only appears through the corresponding Euler equations of dark energy and baryons. We then explore some phenomenological consequences of this scenario and their signatures in several cosmological observables. In particular, we show its ability to suppress the growth of cosmic structures. We also constrain the parameters of the model with cosmological data and show that an interaction of dark energy with baryons on cosmological scales is mildly favoured.
We present a systematic study of modified gravity (MG) models containing a single scalar field non-minimally coupled to the metric. Despite a large parameter space, exploiting the effective field theory of dark energy (EFT of DE) formulation and imposing simple physical constraints such as stability conditions and (sub-)luminal propagation of perturbations, we arrive at a number of generic predictions about the large scale structures.
Are geometrical summaries of the CMB and LSS sufficient for estimating cosmological parameters? And how does our choice of a dark energy model impact the current constraints on standard cosmological parameters? We address these questions in the context of the widely used CPL parametrization of a time varying equation of state w in a cosmology allowing spatial curvature. We study examples of different behavior allowed in a CPL parametrization in a phase diagram, and relate these to effects on the observables. We examine parameter constraints in such a cosmology by combining WMAP5, SDSS, SNe, HST data sets by comparing the power spectra. We carefully quantify the differences of these constraints to those obtained by using geometrical summaries for the same data sets. We find that (a) using summary parameters instead of the full data sets give parameter constraints that are similar, but with discernible differences, (b) due to degeneracies, the constraints on the standard parameters broaden significantly for the same data sets. In particular, we find that in the context of CPL dark energy, (i) a Harrison-Zeldovich spectrum cannot be ruled out at $2sigma$ levels with our current data sets. and (ii) the SNe IA, HST, and WMAP 5 data are not sufficient to constrain spatial curvature; we additionally require the SDSS DR4 data to achieve this.
The possibility of reconstruction of Lagrangian for the scalar field dark energy with constant effective sound speed $c_s$ is analyzed. It is found that such reconstruction can be made with accuracy up to an arbitrary constant. The value of $c_s$ is estimated together with other dark energy parameters ($Omega_{de}$, $w_0$, $c_a^2$) and main cosmological ones on the basis of data including Planck-2013 results on CMB anisotropy, BAO distance ratios from recent galaxy surveys, galaxy power spectrum from WiggleZ, magnitude-redshift relations for distant SNe Ia from SNLS3 and Union2.1 compilations, the HST determination of the Hubble constant. It is shown that no value of $c_s$ from the range [0,1] is preferred by the used data because of very weak influence of dark energy perturbations on the large scale structure formation and CMB temperature fluctuations.
LCDM cosmological models with Early Dark Energy (EDE) have been proposed to resolve tensions between the Hubble constant H0 = 100h km/s/Mpc measured locally, giving h ~ 0.73, and H0 deduced from Planck cosmic microwave background (CMB) and other early universe measurements plus LCDM, giving h ~ 0.67. EDE models do this by adding a scalar field that temporarily adds dark energy equal to about 10% of the cosmological energy density at the end of the radiation-dominated era at redshift z ~ 3500. Here we compare linear and nonlinear predictions of a Planck-normalized LCDM model including EDE giving h = 0.728 with those of standard Planck-normalized LCDM with h = 0.678. We find that nonlinear evolution reduces the differences between power spectra of fluctuations at low redshifts. As a result, at z = 0 the halo mass functions on galactic scales are nearly the same, with differences only 1-2%. However, the differences dramatically increase at high redshifts. The EDE model predicts 50% more massive clusters at z = 1 and twice more galaxy-mass halos at z = 4. Even greater increases in abundances of galaxy-mass halos at higher redshifts may make it easier to reionize the universe with EDE. Predicted galaxy abundances and clustering will soon be tested by JWST observations. Positions of baryonic acoustic oscillations (BAOs) and correlation functions differ by about 2% between the models -- an effect that is not washed out by nonlinearities. Both standard LCDM and the EDE model studied here agree well with presently available acoustic-scale observations, but DESI and Euclid measurements will provide stringent new tests.