Testing a quintessence model with Yukawa interaction from cosmological observations and N-body simulations

TL;DR

This study tests a dark energy-dark matter interaction model with Yukawa coupling using recent cosmological data and N-body simulations, finding it compatible with observations and potentially alleviating existing measurement tensions.

Contribution

It introduces and constrains a Yukawa interaction model between dark energy and dark matter using updated observational data and performs N-body simulations to explore its implications.

Findings

Interaction is compatible with current data

Planck data improves constraints significantly

Model can alleviate tensions between lensing and CMB measurements

Abstract

We consider a quintessence model with Yukawa interaction between dark energy and dark matter and constrain this model by employing the recent cosmological data including the updated cosmic microwave background (CMB) measurements from Planck 2015, the weak gravitational lensing measurements from Kilo Degree Survey (KiDS) and redshift-space distortions. We find that an interaction in the dark sector is compatible with observations. The updated Planck data can significantly improve the constraints compared with the previous results from Planck 2013, while the KiDS data has less constraining power than Planck. The Yukawa interaction model is found to be moderately favored by Planck and able to alleviate the discordance between weak lensing measurements and CMB measurements as previously inferred from the standard Lambda cold dark matter model. N-body simulations for Yukawa interaction model is also performed. We find that using the halo density profile is plausible to improve the constraints significantly in the future.