Simulations of quintessential cold dark matter: beyond the cosmological constant, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 401

We study the non-linear growth of cosmic structure in different dark energy models, using large volume N-body simulations. We consider a range of quintessence models which feature both rapidly and slowly varying dark energy equations of state, and compare the growth of structure to that in a universe with a cosmological constant. We use a four-parameter equation of state for the dark energy which accurately reproduces the quintessence dynamics over a wide range of redshifts. The adoption of a quintessence model changes the expansion history of the universe, the form of the linear theory power spectrum and can alter key observables, such as the horizon scale and the distance to last scattering. We incorporate these effects into our simulations in stages to isolate the impact of each on the growth of structure. The difference in structure formation can be explained to first order by the difference in growth factor at a given epoch; this scaling also accounts for the non-linear growth at the 15 per cent level. We find that quintessence models that are different from cold dark matter (CDM) both today and at high redshifts (z ∼ 1000), and which feature late (z < 2), rapid transitions in the equation of state, can have identical baryonic acoustic oscillation (BAO) peak position