Clarifying the effects of interacting dark energy on linear and nonlinear structure formation processes

TL;DR

This study uses numerical simulations to analyze how interacting dark energy models influence cosmic structure formation, highlighting the dominant role of velocity-dependent acceleration in nonlinear regimes and its impact on halo concentrations.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive numerical comparison of effects in interacting dark energy models, clarifying discrepancies and confirming the significance of velocity-dependent acceleration.

Findings

Velocity-dependent acceleration reduces halo concentrations.

Interactions influence matter power spectrum and bias.

Results confirm previous findings with improved numerical approaches.

Abstract

We present a detailed numerical study of the impact that cosmological models featuring a direct interaction between the Dark Energy component that drives the accelerated expansion of the Universe and Cold Dark Matter can have on the linear and nonlinear stages of structure formation. By means of a series of collisionless N-body simulations we study the influence that each of the different effects characterizing these cosmological models - which include among others a fifth force, a time variation of particle masses, and a velocity-dependent acceleration - separately have on the growth of density perturbations and on a series of observable quantities related to linear and nonlinear cosmic structures, as the matter power spectrum, the gravitational bias between baryons and Cold Dark Matter, the halo mass function and the halo density profiles. We perform our analysis applying and comparing different numerical approaches previously adopted in the literature, and we address the partial discrepancies recently claimed in a similar study by Li & Barrow (2010b) with respect to the first outcomes of Baldi et al. (2010), which are found to be related to the specific numerical approach adopted in the former work. Our results fully confirm the conclusions of Baldi et al. (2010) and show that when linear and nonlinear effects of the interaction between Dark Energy and Cold Dark Matter are properly disentangled, the velocity-dependent acceleration is the leading effect acting at nonlinear scales, and in particular is the most important mechanism in lowering the concentration of Cold Dark Matter halos.