Clarifying the effects of interacting dark energy on linear and non-linear structure formation processes

We present a detailed numerical study of the impact that cosmological models featuring a direct interaction between the dark energy component that drives the accelerated expansion of the Universe and cold dark matter can have on the linear and non-linear stages of structure formation. By means of a series of collisionless N-body simulations, we study the influence that each of the different effects characterizing these cosmological models - which include among others a fifth force, a time variation of particle masses and a velocity-dependent acceleration - separately have on the growth of density perturbations and on a series of observable quantities related to linear and non-linear cosmic structures, as the matter power spectrum, the gravitational bias between baryons and cold dark matter, the halo mass function and the halo density profiles. We perform our analysis applying and comparing different numerical approaches previously adopted in the literature, and we address the partial discrepancies recently claimed in a similar study by Li & Barrow with respect to the first outcomes of Baldi et al., which are found to be related to the specific numerical approach adopted in the former work. Our results fully confirm the conclusions of Baldi et al. and show that when linear and non-linear effects of the interaction between dark energy and cold dark matter are properly disentangled, the velocity-dependent acceleration is the leading effect acting at non-linear scales and in particular is the most important mechanism in lowering the concentration of cold dark matter haloes.