Backreaction from inhomogeneous matter fields during large-scale structure formation

TL;DR

This paper investigates how inhomogeneities in matter fields influence the large-scale structure formation in the universe, focusing on backreaction effects and their impact on cosmological equations and growth of structures.

Contribution

It develops a formalism to analyze matter field backreaction beyond ideal fluids, including two-fluid models and far-from-equilibrium scenarios, extending previous approaches.

Findings

Backreaction effects are generally small or suppressed in typical two-fluid models.

The formalism can address late-time and non-linear scale scenarios.

Backreaction does not significantly alter standard structure growth in studied models.

Abstract

We study how inhomogeneities of the cosmological fluid fields backreact on the homogeneous part of energy density and how they modify the Friedmann equations. In general, backreaction requires to go beyond the pressureless ideal fluid approximation, and this can lead to a reduced growth of cosmological large scale structure. Since observational evidence favours evolution close to the standard growing mode in the linear regime, we focus on two-component fluids in which the non-ideal fluid is gravitationally coupled to cold dark matter and in which a standard growing mode persists. This is realized, e.g. for a baryonic fluid coupled to cold dark matter. We calculate the backreaction for this case and for a wide range of other two-fluid models. Here the effect is either suppressed because the non-ideal matter properties are numerically too small, or because they lead to a too stringent UV cut-off of the integral over the power spectrum that determines backreaction. We discuss then matter field backreaction from a broader perspective and generalize the formalism such that also far-from-equilibrium scenarios relevant to late cosmological times and non-linear scales can be addressed in the future.