We consider a self-consistent and physical approach to interacting dark energy models described by a Lagrangian, and identify a new class of models with variable dark energy sound speed. We show that if the interaction between dark energy in the form of quintessence and cold dark matter is purely momentum exchange this generally leads to a dark energy sound speed that deviates from unity. Choosing a specific sub-case, we study its phenomenology by investigating the effects of the interaction on the cosmic microwave background and linear matter power spectrum. We also perform a global fitting of cosmological parameters using CMB data, and compare our findings to ΛCDM.
We consider two models of interacting dark energy, both of which interact only through momentum exchange. One is a phenomenological one-parameter extension to wCDM, and the other is a coupled quintessence model described by a Lagrangian formalism. Using a variety of high and low redshift data sets, we perform a global fitting of cosmological parameters and compare to ΛCDM, uncoupled quintessence, and wCDM. We find that the models are competitive with ΛCDM, even obtaining a better fit when certain data sets are included.
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