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Title: Fingerprinting dark energy. II. Weak lensing and galaxy clustering tests

Journal Article · · Physical Review. D, Particles Fields
 [1];  [2];  [3]
  1. Departamento de Fisica Teorica and Instituto de Fisica Teorica, Universidad Autonoma de Madrid IFT-UAM/CSIC, Cantoblanco, Madrid (Spain)
  2. Departement de Physique Theorique, Universite de Geneve, 24 quai Ernest Ansermet, CH-1211 Geneve 4 (Switzerland)
  3. University of Heidelberg, Philosophenweg 16, 69120 Heidelberg (Germany)

The characterization of dark energy is a central task of cosmology. To go beyond a cosmological constant, we need to introduce at least an equation of state and a sound speed and consider observational tests that involve perturbations. If dark energy is not completely homogeneous on observable scales, then the Poisson equation is modified and dark matter clustering is directly affected. One can then search for observational effects of dark energy clustering using dark matter as a probe. In this paper we exploit an analytical approximate solution of the perturbation equations in a general dark energy cosmology to analyze the performance of next-decade large-scale surveys in constraining equation of state and sound speed. We find that tomographic weak lensing and galaxy redshift surveys can constrain the sound speed of the dark energy only if the latter is small, of the order of c{sub s} < or approx. 0.01 (in units of c). For larger sound speeds the error grows to 100% and more. We conclude that large-scale structure observations contain very little information about the perturbations in canonical scalar field models with a sound speed of unity. Nevertheless, they are able to detect the presence of cold dark energy, i.e. a dark energy with nonrelativistic speed of sound.

OSTI ID:
21509918
Journal Information:
Physical Review. D, Particles Fields, Vol. 82, Issue 10; Other Information: DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevD.82.103535; (c) 2010 American Institute of Physics; ISSN 0556-2821
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English