A Universe Without Dark Energy: Cosmic Acceleration from Dark Matter-Baryon Interactions

Abstract: Cosmic acceleration is widely believed to require either a source of negative pressure (i.e., dark energy), or a modification of gravity, which necessarily implies new degrees of freedom beyond those of Einstein gravity. In this paper we present a third possibility, using only dark matter and ordinary matter. The mechanism relies on the coupling between dark matter and ordinary matter through an effective metric. Dark matter couples to an Einstein-frame metric, and experiences a matter-dominated, decelerating cosmology up to the present time. Ordinary matter couples to an effective metric that depends also on the DM density, in such a way that it experiences late-time acceleration. Linear density perturbations are stable and propagate with arbitrarily small sound speed, at least in the case of `pressure' coupling. Assuming a simple parametrization of the effective metric, we show that our model can successfully match a set of basic cosmological observables, including luminosity distance, BAO measurements, angular-diameter distance to last scattering {\it etc.} For the growth history of density perturbations, we find an intriguing connection between the growth factor and the Hubble constant. To get a growth history similar to the $\Lambda$CDM prediction, our model predicts a higher $H_0$, closer to the value preferred by direct estimates. On the flip side, we tend to overpredict the growth of structures whenever $H_0$ is comparable to the Planck preferred value. The model also tends to predict larger redshift-space distortions at low redshift than $\Lambda$CDM.