Very large scale structures in growing neutrino quintessence

Understand

A quintessence scalar field or cosmon interacting with neutrinos can have important effects on cosmological structure formation.

• Within growing neutrino models the coupling becomes effective only in recent times, when neutrinos become non-relativistic, stopping the evolution of the cosmon.
• This can explain why dark energy dominates the universe only in a rather recent epoch by relating the present dark energy density to the small mass of neutrinos.
• Such models predict the presence of stable neutrino lumps at supercluster scales (~200 Mpc and bigger), caused by an attractive force between neutrinos which is stronger than gravity and mediated by the cosmon.