Testing coupled dark energy models with their cosmological background   evolution
  We consider a cosmology in which dark matter and a quintessence scalar field responsible for the acceleration of the Universe are allowed to interact. Allowing for both conformal and disformal couplings, we perform a global analysis of the constraints on our model using Hubble parameter measurements, baryon acoustic oscillation distance measurements, and a Supernovae Type Ia data set. We find that the additional disformal coupling relaxes the conformal coupling constraints. Moreover we show that, at the background level, a disformal interaction within the dark sector is preferred to both $\Lambda$CDM and uncoupled quintessence, hence favouring interacting dark energy. 
Carsten van de Bruck, Jurgen Mifsud, Jack Morrice
astro-ph.CO gr-qc