How clustering dark energy affects matter perturbations

Understand

The rate of structure formation in the Universe is different in homogeneous and clustered dark energy models.

• The degree of dark energy clustering depends on the magnitude of its effective sound speed $c^{2}_{\rm eff}$ and for $c_{\rm eff}=0$ dark energy clusters in a similar fashion to dark matter while for $c_{\rm eff}=1$ it stays (approximately) homogeneous.
• In this paper we consider two distinct equations of state for the dark energy component, $w_{\rm d}=const$ and $w_{\rm d}=w_0+w_1\left(\frac{z}{1+z}\right)$ with $c_{\rm eff}$ as a free parameter and we try to constrain the dark energy effective sound speed using current available data including SnIa, Baryon Acoustic Oscillation, CMB shift parameter ({\em Planck} and {\em WMAP}), Hubble parameter, Big Bang Nucleosynthesis and the growth rate of structures $f\sigma_{8}(z)$.
• At first we derive the most general form of the equations governing dark matter and dark energy clustering under the assumption that $c_{\rm eff}=const$.