Interactions and Instabilities in Cosmology's Dark Sector

Abstract

I consider couplings between the dark energy and dark matter sectors. I describe how the existence of an adiabatic regime, in which the dark energy field instantaneously tracks the minimum of its effective potential, opens the door for a catastrophic instability. This {\it adiabatic instability} tightly constrains a wide class of interacting dark sector models. This talk was presented at, and will appear in the proceedings of the DPF-2009 conference.

6 pages, 2 figures. Talk presented at the DPF-2009 Conference, Detroit, MI, July 27-31, 2009. To appear in the proceedings

References in corpus (3)

• Approaches to Understanding Cosmic Acceleration
• Adiabatic instability in coupled dark energy-dark matter models
• Supernovae type Ia data favour coupled phantom energy