Quintessential isocurvature in separate universe simulations

Abstract

In a universe with quintessence isocurvature, or perturbations in dark energy that are independent from the usual curvature perturbations, structure formation is changed qualitatively. The existence of two independent fields, curvature and isocurvature, causes the growth rate of matter perturbations to depend on their initial conditions. The quintessence perturbations cause their growth to depend on scale. We perform the first separate universe simulations for this cosmology. We demonstrate that the power spectrum response and the halo bias depend on scale and initial conditions and that the presence of the isocurvature mode changes the mapping from these quantities to the halo auto- and cross-power spectra, and the squeezed-limit bispectrum. We compare the bias to several models, finding reasonable agreement with both a power-spectrum-response model with one free parameter and a model that fits two independent bias parameters for curvature and isocurvature sourced fluctuations. We also verify that simulation responses to pure isocurvature and pure curvature modes can be linearly combined to reproduce responses with different ratios of isocurvature and curvature. This allows our results to be used to predict the halo power spectrum and stochasticity with arbitrary large-scale curvature and isocurvature power spectra. In an appendix, we study the generation of quintessence isocurvature during inflation and show that a modified kinetic term is typically required to produce observable isocurvature modes in a field with $w_Q\approx -1$.