The Adiabatic Instability on Cosmology's Dark Side

Abstract

We consider theories with a nontrivial coupling between the matter and dark energy sectors. We describe a small scale instability that can occur in such models when the coupling is strong compared to gravity, generalizing and correcting earlier treatments. The instability is characterized by a negative sound speed squared of an effective coupled dark matter/dark energy fluid. Our results are general, and applicable to a wide class of coupled models and provide a powerful, redshift-dependent tool, complementary to other constraints, with which to rule many of them out. A detailed analysis and applications to a range of models are presented in a longer companion paper.

4 pages, 1 figure

References in corpus (1)

• Matter density perturbations and effective gravitational constant in modified gravity models of dark energy

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• Clustering Properties of Dynamical Dark Energy Models
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