Models of dark matter coupled to dark energy

Abstract

We present three distinct types of models of dark energy in the form of a scalar field which is explicitly coupled to dark matter. Our construction draws from the pull-back formalism for fluids and generalizes the fluid action to involve couplings to the scalar field. We investigate the cosmology of each class of model both at the background and linearly perturbed level. We choose a potential for the scalar field and a specific coupling function for each class of models and we compute the cosmic microwave background and matter power spectra. © 2013 American Physical Society.