Dark energy and structure formation

Abstract

We study the gravitational dynamics of dark energy configurations. We report on the time evolution of the dark energy field configurations as well as the time evolution of the energy density to demonstrate the gravitational collapse of dark energy field configurations. We live in a Universe which is dominated by Dark Energy. According to current estimates about 75% of the Energy Density is in the form of Dark Energy. Thus when we consider gravitational dynamics and Structure Formation we expect Dark Energy to play an important role. The most promising candidate for dark energy is the energy density of fields in curved space-time. It therefore become a pressing need to understand the gravitational dynamics of dark energy field configurations. We develop and describe the formalism to study the gravitational collapse of fields given any general potential for the fields. We apply this formalism to models of dark energy motivated by particle physics considerations. We solve the resulting evolution equations which determine the time evolution of field configurations as well as the dynamics of space-time. Our results show that gravitational collapse of dark energy field configurations occurs and must be considered in any complete picture of our universe. © 2010 IOP Publishing Ltd.