Constraints on Dark Matter-Dark Energy Scattering from ACT DR6 CMB Lensing

The predicted present-day amplitude of matter fluctuations based on cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropy data has sometimes been found discrepant with more direct measurements of late-time structure. This has motivated many extensions to the standard cosmological model, including kinetic interactions between dark matter and dark energy that introduce a drag force slowing the growth of structure at late times. Exploring this scenario, we develop a model for quasi-linear scales in the matter power spectrum by calculating the critical overdensity in the presence of this interaction and a varying dark energy equation of state. We explicitly avoid modeling or interpretation of data on non-linear scales in this model (such as use of ΛCDM-calibrated priors), which would require numerical simulations. We find that the presence of the drag force hinders halo formation, thus increasing the deviation from ΛCDM in the mildly non-linear regime. We use CMB lensing observations from the sixth data release of the Atacama Cosmology Telescope up to $L=1250$ (in combination with Planck, Sloan Digital Sky Survey, and 6dFGS data) to derive the strongest constraints to date on the amplitude of the drag term, finding the dimensionless interaction strength ΓDMDE/(H₀ρc)<0.831\; (2.81) at the 68% (95%) confidence level. The inclusion of non-linear corrections improves our constraints by about 35% compared to linear theory. Our results do not exclude the best-fit values of ΓDMDE found in previous studies using information from galaxy weak lensing, though we find no statistical preference for the dark matter-dark energy kinetic interactions over ΛCDM. We implement our model in a publicly available fork of the Boltzmann code CLASS at https://github.com/fmccarthy/Class_DMDE.