Cosmological two-stream instability

Two-stream instability requires, essentially, two things to operate: a relative flow between two fluids and some type of interaction between them. In this Letter we provide the first demonstration that this mechanism may be active in a cosmological context. Building on a recently developed formalism for cosmological models with two, interpenetrating fluids with a relative flow between them, we show that two-stream instability may be triggered during the transition from one fluid domination to the other. We also demonstrate that the cosmological expansion eventually shuts down the instability by driving to zero the relative flow and the coupling between the two fluids.