Simulations of Quintessential Cold Dark Matter: beyond the cosmological constant

Understand

We study the nonlinear growth of cosmic structure in different dark energy models, using large volume N-body simulations.

• We consider a range of quintessence models which feature both rapidly and slowly varying dark energy equations of state, and compare the growth of structure to that in a universe with a cosmological constant.
• The adoption of a quintessence model changes the expansion history of the universe, the form of the linear theory power spectrum and can alter key observables, such as the horizon scale and the distance to last scattering.
• We incorporate these effects into our simulations in stages to isolate the impact of each on the growth of structure.