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I review theoretical expectations for the probable appearance of galaxies during their formation phase, placing particular emphasis on the uncertainties in these ideas. Recent models suggest that formation may occur relatively recently, but that young galaxies are less spectacular than previously supposed. They may be analogous to recently discovered high red - shift radio galaxies, and indeed they may have been observed directly in faint galaxy counts. I summarise several other lines of evidence which suggest that galaxy formation may have been a recent process. Finally I give preliminary results from a detailed analytic study of the observable properties of young galaxies in a Cold Dark Matter universe. Predictions are given for faint galaxy counts and redshift distributions, and for the galaxy luminosity function.

It is now a consolidated fact that our Universe is undergoing an accelerated expansion. According to Einstein's General Relativity, if the main constituents of our Universe were ordinary and cold dark matter, then we would expect it to be contracting and collapsing due to matter's attractive nature. The simplest explanation we have for this acceleration is in the form of a component with a negative ratio of pressure to density equal to -1 known as cosmological constant, Λ , presently dominating over baryonic and cold dark matter. However, the Λ Cold Dark Matter (Λ CDM) model suffers from a well known fine tuning problem. This led to the formulation of dark energy and modified gravity theories as alternatives to the problem of cosmic acceleration. These theories either include additional degrees of freedom, higher-order equations of motion, extra dimensionalities or imply non-locality. In this thesis we focus on single field scalar tensor theories embedded within Horndeski gravity. Even though there is currently doubt on their ability to explain cosmic acceleration without having a bare cosmological constant on their action, the degree of freedom they introduce mediates an additional fifth force. And while this force has to suppressed on Solar system scales, it can have interesting and observable effects on cosmological scales. Over the next decade there is a surge of surveys that will improve the understanding of our Universe on the largest scales. Hence, in this work, we take several different modified gravity theories and study their impact on cosmological observables. We will analyze the dynamics of linear perturbations on these theories and clearly highlight how they deviate from Λ CDM, allowing to break the degeneracy at the background level. We will also study the evolution of the gravitational potentials on sub horizon scales and provide simplified expressions at this regime and, for some models, obtain constraints using the latest data.

Flat cosmology with collisionless cold dark matter (CDM) and cosmological constant ([Lambda]CDM cosmology) may have some problems on small scales, even though it has been very successful on large scales. We study the effect of Self-Interacting Dark Matter (SIDM) hypothesis on the density profiles of halos. Collisionless CDM predicts cuspy density profiles toward the center, while observations of low mass galaxies prefer cored profiles. SIDM was proposed by Spergel & Steinhardt [161] as a possible solution to this cuspy profile problem on low-mass scales. On the other hand, observations and collisionless CDM agree on mass scales of galaxy clusters. It is also known that the SIDM hypothesis would contradict with X-ray and gravitational lensing observations of cluster of galaxies, if the cross section were too large. Our final goal is to find the range of SIDM scattering cross section models that are consistent with those astrophysical observations in two different mass scales. There are two theoretical approaches to compute the effect of self-interacting scattering -- Gravitational N-body simulation with Monte Carlo scattering and conducting fluid model; those two approaches, however, had not been confirmed to agree with each other. We first show that two methods are in reasonable agreement with each other for both isolated halos and for halos with realistic mass assembly history in an expanding [Lambda]CDM universe; the value of cross section necessary to have a maximally relaxed low-density core in [Lambda]CDM is in mutual agreement. We then develop a semianalytic model that predicts the time evolution of SIDM halo. Our semianalytic relaxation model enables us to understand how a SIDM halo would relax to a cored profile, and obtain an ensemble of SIDM halos from collisionless simulations with reasonable computational resources. We apply the semianalytic relaxation model to CDM halos, and compare the resulting statistical distribution of SIDM halos with astrophysical observations. We show that there exists a range of scattering cross sections that simultaneously solve the cuspy core problem on low-mass scales and satisfy the galaxy cluster observations. We also present that other potential conflicts between [Lambda]CDM and observations could be resolved in Part II and III. / text

Mémoire numérisé par la Division de la gestion de documents et des archives de l'Université de Montréal.

Mémoire numérisé par la Division de la gestion de documents et des archives de l'Université de Montréal

>Magister Scientiae - MSc / The growth of structure in the Universe proceeds via the collapse of dark matter and baryons. This process is retarded by dark energy which drives an accelerated expansion of the late Universe. In this thesis we use cosmological perturbation theory to investigate structure formation for a particular class of dark energy models, i.e. interacting dark energy models. In these models there is a non-gravitational interaction between dark energy and dark matter, which alters the standard evolution (with non-interacting dark energy) of the Universe. We consider a simple form of the interaction where the energy exchange in the background is proportional to the dark energy density. We analyse the background dynamics to uncover the e ect of the interaction. Then we develop the perturbation equations that govern the evolution of density perturbations, peculiar velocities and the gravitational potential. We carefully account for the complex nature of the perturbed interaction, in particular for the momentum transfer in the dark sector. This leads to two di erent types of model, where the momentum exchange vanishes either in the dark matter rest-frame or the dark energy rest-frame. The evolution equations for the perturbations are solved numerically, to show how structure formation is altered by the interaction.

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