Dark Energy - Dark Matter Unification: Generalized Chaplygin Gas Model

Abstract

We review the main features of the generalized Chaplygin gas (GCG) proposal for unification of dark energy and dark matter and discuss how it admits an unique decomposition into dark energy and dark matter components once phantom-like dark energy is excluded. In the context of this approach we consider structure formation and show that unphysical oscillations or blow-up in the matter power spectrum are not present. Moreover, we demonstrate that the dominance of dark energy occurs about the time when energy density fluctuations start evolving away from the linear regime.Comment: 15 pages, 5 figures; Talk presented at the V New Worlds in Astroparticle Physics, Faro, Portugal, 8-10 January 2005. Reference and numbering of equations fixe