No Arabic abstract
We intend to understand cosmological structure formation within the framework of superfluid models of dark matter with finite temperatures. Of particular interest is the evolution of small-scale structures where the pressure and superfluid properties of the dark matter fluid are prominent. We compare the growth of structures in these models with the standard cold dark matter paradigm and non-superfluid dark matter. The equations for superfluid hydrodynamics were computed numerically in an expanding $Lambda$CDM background with spherical symmetry; the effect of various superfluid fractions, temperatures, interactions, and masses on the collapse of structures was taken into consideration. We derived the linear perturbation of the superfluid equations, giving further insights into the dynamics of the superfluid collapse. We found that while a conventional dark matter fluid with self-interactions and finite temperatures experiences a suppression in the growth of structures on smaller scales, as expected due to the presence of pressure terms, a superfluid can collapse much more efficiently than was naively expected due to its ability to suppress the growth of entropy perturbations and thus gradients in the thermal pressure. We also found that the cores of the dark matter halos initially become more superfluid during the collapse, but eventually reach a point where the superfluid fraction falls sharply. The formation of superfluid dark matter halos surrounded by a normal fluid dark matter background is therefore disfavored by the present work.
The influence of considering a generalized dark matter (GDM) model, which allows for a non-pressure-less dark matter and a non-vanishing sound speed in the non-linear spherical collapse model is discussed for the Einstein-de Sitter-like (EdSGDM) and $Lambda$GDM models. By assuming that the vacuum component responsible for the accelerated expansion of the Universe is not clustering and therefore behaving similarly to the cosmological constant $Lambda$, we show how the change in the GDM characteristic parameters affects the linear density threshold for collapse of the non-relativistic component ($delta_{rm c}$) and its virial overdensity ($Delta_{rm V}$). We found that the generalized dark matter equation of state parameter $w_{rm gdm}$ is responsible for lower values of the linear overdensity parameter as compared to the standard spherical collapse model and that this effect is much stronger than the one induced by a change in the generalized dark matter sound speed $c^2_{rm s, gdm}$. We also found that the virial overdensity is only slightly affected and mostly sensitive to the generalized dark matter equation of state parameter $w_{rm gdm}$. These effects could be relatively enhanced for lower values of the matter density. Finally, we found that the effects of the additional physics on $delta_{rm c}$ and $Delta_{rm V}$, when translated to non-linear observables such as the halo mass function, induce an overall deviation of about 40% with respect to the standard $Lambda$CDM model at late times for high mass objects. However, within the current linear constraints for $c^2_{rm s, gdm}$ and $w_{rm gdm}$, we found that these changes are the consequence of properly taking into account the correct linear matter power spectrum for the GDM model while the effects coming from modifications in the spherical collapse model remain negligible.
We study the gravitational collapse of an overdensity of nonrelativistic matter under the action of gravity and a chameleon scalar field. We show that the spherical collapse model is modified by the presence of a chameleon field. In particular, we find that even though the chameleon effects can be potentially large at small scales, for a large enough initial size of the inhomogeneity the collapsing region possesses a thin shell that shields the modification of gravity induced by the chameleon field, recovering the standard gravity results. We analyse the behaviour of a collapsing shell in a cosmological setting in the presence of a thin shell and find that, in contrast to the usual case, the critical density for collapse depends on the initial comoving size of the inhomogeneity.
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.
We study, for the first time, how shear and angular momentum modify typical parameters of the spherical collapse model, in dark energy dominated universes. In particular, we study the linear density threshold for collapse $delta_mathrm{c}$ and the virial overdensity $Delta_mathrm{V}$, for several dark-energy models and its influence on the cumulative mass function. The equations of the spherical collapse are those obtained in Pace et al. (2010), who used the fully nonlinear differential equation for the evolution of the density contrast derived from Newtonian hydrodynamics, and assumed that dark energy is present only at the background level. With the introduction of the shear and rotation terms, the parameters of the spherical collapse model are now mass-dependant. The results of the paper show, as expected, that the new terms considered in the spherical collapse model oppose the collapse of perturbations on galactic scale giving rise to higher values of the linear overdensity parameter with respect to the non-rotating case. We find a similar effect also for the virial overdensity parameter. For what concerns the mass function, we find that its high mass tail is suppressed, while the low mass tail is slightly affected except in some cases, e.g. the Chaplygin gas case.
Critical overdensity $delta_c$ is a key concept in estimating the number count of halos for different redshift and halo-mass bins, and therefore, it is a powerful tool to compare cosmological models to observations. There are currently two different prescriptions in the literature for its calculation, namely, the differential-radius and the constant-infinity methods. In this work we show that the latter yields precise results {it only} if we are careful in the definition of the so-called numerical infinities. Although the subtleties we point out are crucial ingredients for an accurate determination of $delta_c$ both in general relativity and in any other gravity theory, we focus on $f(R)$ modified-gravity models in the metric approach; in particular, we use the so-called large ($F=1/3$) and small-field ($F=0$) limits. For both of them, we calculate the relative errors (between our method and the others) in the critical density $delta_c$, in the comoving number density of halos per logarithmic mass interval $n_{ln M}$ and in the number of clusters at a given redshift in a given mass bin $N_{rm bin}$, as functions of the redshift. We have also derived an analytical expression for the density contrast in the linear regime as a function of the collapse redshift $z_c$ and $Omega_{m0}$ for any $F$.