  We use the spherical collapse model of structure formation to investigate the
separation in the collapse of uncoupled matter (essentially baryons) and
coupled dark matter in an interacting dark energy scenario. Following the usual
assumption of a single radius of collapse for all species, we show that we only
need to evolve the uncoupled matter sector to obtain the evolution for all
matter components. This gives us more information on the collapse with a
simplified set of evolution equations compared with the usual approaches. We
then apply these results to four quintessence potentials and show how we can
discriminate between different quintessence models.

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics;General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology;High Energy Physics - Theory