Interactions and Instabilities in Cosmology's Dark Sector

Abstract

I consider couplings between the dark energy and dark matter sectors. I describe how the existence of an adiabatic regime, in which the dark energy field instantaneously tracks the minimum of its effective potential, opens the door for a catastrophic instability. This {\it adiabatic instability} tightly constrains a wide class of interacting dark sector models. This talk was presented at, and will appear in the proceedings of the DPF-2009 conference.