A comparison of structure formation in minimally and non-minimally coupled quintessence models

Understand

We study structure formation in non-minimally coupled dark energy models, where there is a coupling in the Lagrangian between a quintessence scalar field and gravity via the Ricci scalar.

• We consider models with a range of different non-minimal coupling strengths and compare these to minimally coupled quintessence models with time-dependent dark energy densities.
• The equations of state of the latter are tuned to either reproduce the equation of state of the non-minimally coupled models or their background history.
• Thereby they provide a reference to study the unique imprints of coupling on structure formation.