On the observability of coupled dark energy with cosmic voids

This article has been accepted for publication in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society ©: 2015 The Authors. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Royal Astronomical Society. All rights reservedTaking N-body simulations with volumes and particle densities tuned to match the sloan digital sky survey DR7 spectroscopic main sample, we assess the ability of current void catalogues to distinguish a model of coupled dark matter-dark energy from Λ cold dark matter cosmology using properties of cosmic voids. Identifying voids with the VIDE toolkit, we find no statistically significant differences in the ellipticities, but find that coupling produces a population of significantly larger voids, possibly explaining the recent result of Tavasoli et al. In addition, we use the universal density profile of Hamaus et al. to quantify the relationship between coupling and density profile shape, finding that the coupling produces broader, shallower, undercompensated profiles for large voids by thinning the walls between adjacent medium-scale voids. We find that these differences are potentially measurable with existing void catalogues once effects from survey geometries and peculiar velocities are taken into accountBDW acknowledges funding from an ANR Chaire d'Excellence (ANR-10-CEXC-004-01), the UPMC Chaire Internationale in Theoretical Cosmology, and NSF grants AST-0908 902 and AST-0708849. This work made in the ILP LABEX (under reference ANR-10-LABX-63) was supported by French state funds managed by the ANR within the Investissements d'Avenir programme under reference ANR-11-IDEX-0004-02 AK is supported by the Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad (MINECO) in Spain through grant AYA2012- 31101 as well as the Consolider-Ingenio 2010 Programme of the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación (MICINN) under grant MultiDark CSD2009-00064. He also acknowledges support from the Australian Research Council (ARC) grants DP130100117 and DP14010019