The impact of constrained interacting dark energy on the bound-zone velocity profile

TL;DR

This study investigates how constrained interacting dark energy (CIDER) influences the velocity profiles around dark matter halos, revealing that the velocity slope can distinguish between different dark energy models.

Contribution

The paper demonstrates that the bound-zone velocity slope is sensitive to dark sector coupling and provides an analytic formula to quantify this effect, aiding in dark energy model discrimination.

Findings

The universal velocity profile formula applies to CIDER models.

Velocity slope decreases with increasing dark sector coupling $eta$.

Velocity amplitude remains largely unaffected by $eta$.

Abstract

We numerically study the effects of constrained interacting dark energy (CIDER) on the bound-zone velocity profiles around massive dark matter halos. Analyzing the CIDER simulations performed by Baldi (2023) for three different cases of dark sector coupling ($\beta=0.03$, $0.05$ and $0.08$) as well as for the standard $\Lambda$CDM cosmology ($\beta=0$), we determine the mean peculiar velocity profiles in the bound zones around the friends-of-friends halos with masses larger than $M_{\rm cut}=3\times 10^{13}\,h^{-1}M_{\odot}$ at three redshifts, $z=0$, $0.5$ and $1$. It is found that the universal power-law formula proposed by Falco et al. (2024) originally for the $\Lambda$CDM case still describes well the bound-zone velocity profiles, $V(r)$, even in the CIDER models. The slope of $V(r)$, turns out to be significantly affected by the CIDER, progressively decreasing as $\beta$ increases. Meanwhile, the amplitude of $V(r)$ exhibits little dependence on $\beta$, which is ascribed to the identical Hubble parameters shared by the $\Lambda$CDM and CIDER models in the entire redshift range. Our results imply that the bound-zone velocity slope can break a degeneracy even between the $\Lambda$CDM and CIDER models with $\beta\le 0.03$, which the standard cosmological diagnostics fail to distinguish. We devise a simple analytic formula for the bound-zone slope as a function of $\beta$, and prove its validity at all of the three redshifts. It is concluded that the slope of the mean bound-zone peculiar velocity profile should be in principle a powerful probe of dark sector interaction.