Perturbations growth and bias during acceleration

Abstract

In most models of dark energy the structure formation stops when the accelerated expansion begins. In contrast, we show that the coupling of dark energy to dark matter may induce the growth of perturbations even in the accelerated regime. In particular, we show that this occurs in the models proposed to solve the cosmic coincidence problem, in which the ratio of dark energy to dark matter is constant. Moreover, if the dark energy couples only to dark matter and not to baryons, as requested by the constraints imposed by local gravity measurements, the baryon fluctuations develop a constant, scale-independent, large-scale bias which is in principle directly observable.