Phantom damping of matter perturbations

Cosmological scaling solutions are particularly important in solving the coincidence problem of dark energy. We derive the equations of sub-Hubble linear matter perturbations for a general scalar-field Lagrangian-including quintessence, tachyon, dilatonic ghost condensate and k-essence-and solve them analytically for scaling solutions. We find that matter perturbations are always damped if a phantom field is coupled to dark matter and identify the cases in which the gravitational potential is constant. This provides an interesting possibility to place stringent observational constraints on scaling dark energy models. (c) 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.