Non-linear cosmological collapse of quintessence

Understand

We present a study of the fully relativistic spherical collapse in presence of quintessence using on Numerical Relativity, following the method proposed by the authors in a previous article [arXiv:1409.3476].

• We ascertain the validity of the method by studying the evolution of a spherically symmetric quintessence inhomogeneity on a de Sitter background and we find that it has an impact on the local expansion around the centre of coordinates.
• We then proceed to compare the results of our method to those of the more largely adopted top-hat model.
• We find that quintessence inhomogeneities do build up under the effect that matter inhomogeneities have on the local space-time yet remain very small due to the presence of momentum transfer from the over-dense to the background regions.