Roles of dark energy perturbations in dynamical dark energy models: can we ignore them?

We show the importance of properly including the perturbations of the dark energy component in the dynamical dark energy models based on a scalar field and modified gravity theories in order to meet with present and future observational precisions. Based on a simple scaling scalar field dark energy model, we show that observationally distinguishable substantial differences appear by ignoring the dark energy perturbation. By ignoring it the perturbed system of equations becomes inconsistent and deviations in (gauge-invariant) power spectra depend on the gauge choice.

Infrared divergence of pure Einstein gravity contributions to the cosmological density power spectrum.

We probe the pure Einstein gravity contributions to the second-order density power spectrum. On the small scale, we discover that Einstein's gravity contribution is negligibly small. This guarantees that Newton's gravity is currently sufficient to handle the baryon acoustic oscillation scale. On the large scale, however, we discover that Einstein's gavity contribution to the second-order power spectrum dominates the linear-order power spectrum. Thus, the pure Einstein gravity contribution appearing in the third-order perturbation leads to an infrared divergence in the power spectrum.