Interacting dark energy collapse with matter components separation

TL;DR

This paper studies the collapse of matter in an interacting dark energy universe, showing that evolving only the uncoupled matter simplifies analysis and helps distinguish between different dark energy models.

Contribution

It introduces a simplified method to analyze matter collapse in interacting dark energy scenarios by evolving only the uncoupled matter component.

Findings

Simplified collapse evolution equations for uncoupled matter.

Ability to discriminate between quintessence models.

Enhanced understanding of matter collapse dynamics in dark energy scenarios.

Abstract

We use the spherical collapse model of structure formation to investigate the separation in the collapse of uncoupled matter (essentially baryons) and coupled dark matter in an interacting dark energy scenario. Following the usual assumption of a single radius of collapse for all species, we show that we only need to evolve the uncoupled matter sector to obtain the evolution for all matter components. This gives us more information on the collapse with a simplified set of evolution equations compared with the usual approaches. We then apply these results to four quintessence potentials and show how we can discriminate between different quintessence models.