Coupled Quintessence

TLDR: The cosmological consequences of such a coupled quintessence (CQ) model, assuming an exponential potential and a linear coupling, were investigated in this article, where the authors evaluated the density perturbations on the cosmic microwave background and on the galaxy distribution at the present and derived bounds on the coupling constant.

Abstract: A new component of the cosmic medium, a light scalar field or ''quintessence '', has been proposed recently to explain cosmic acceleration with a dynamical cosmological constant Such a field is expected to be coupled explicitely to ordinary matter, unless some unknown symmetry prevents it I investigate the cosmological consequences of such a coupled quintessence (CQ) model, assuming an exponential potential and a linear coupling This model is conformally equivalent to Brans-Dicke Lagrangians with power-law potential I evaluate the density perturbations on the cosmic microwave background and on the galaxy distribution at the present and derive bounds on the coupling constant from the comparison with observational data A novel feature of CQ is that during the matter dominated era the scalar field has a finite and almost constant energy density This epoch, denoted as $\phi $MDE, is responsible of several differences with respect to uncoupled quintessence: the multipole spectrum of the microwave background is tilted at large angles, the acoustic peaks are shifted, their amplitude is changed, and the present 8Mpc$/h$ density variance is diminished The present data constrain the dimensionless coupling constant to $|\beta |\leq 01$