Dark energy and Structure Formation in the Universe

Cosmic structure formation is one of the main tools to understand the nature of the yet unknown dark energy component of the universe. In the linear regime of structure formation, the basic features of dark energy can be easily extracted, though they are usually degenerate among different models of dark energy. The non-linear regime, on the other hand, may hide distinctive features of dark energy models, although this regime is usually accessible only through expensive and time consuming numerical simulat ions. In this project, we plan to extend some simple semi-analytical models of non-linear structure formation to investigate and discriminate between different models of dark energy. This analysis will be followed by a comparison of the models with availa ble cosmological data, helping us to narrow down the standard model's parameter space.