Virialization in Dark Energy Cosmology

Abstract

We discuss the issue of energy nonconservation in the virialization process of the spherical collapse model with homogeneous dark energy. We propose an approximation scheme to find the virialization radius. By comparing various schemes and estimating the parameter characterizing the ratio of dark energy to dark matter at the turnaround time, we conclude that the problem of energy nonconservation may have sizable effects in fitting models to observations. © 2006. The American Astronomical Society. All rights reserved.