Matter Power Spectrum for the Generalized Chaplygin Gas Model: The Newtonian Approach

TL;DR

This paper investigates the matter power spectrum in the generalized Chaplygin gas model using a neo-Newtonian approach, comparing it with observational data to evaluate the viability of unified dark sector models.

Contribution

It introduces a neo-Newtonian method to compute the matter power spectrum for the generalized Chaplygin gas model and assesses its compatibility with observational data.

Findings

Unified models are strongly disfavored by data.

Separate dark matter models fit the data well.

The model's fit improves for certain parameter ranges.

Abstract

We model the cosmic medium as the mixture of a generalized Chaplygin gas and a pressureless matter component. Within a neo-Newtonian approach (in which, different from standard Newtonian cosmology, the pressure enters the homogeneous and isotropic background dynamics) we compute the matter power spectrum. The 2dFGRS data are used to discriminate between unified models of the dark sector (a purely baryonic matter component of roughly 5 percent of the total energy content and roughly 95 percent generalized Chaplygin gas) and different models, for which there is separate dark matter, in addition to that accounted for by the generalized Chaplygin gas. Leaving the corresponding density parameters free, we find that the unified models are strongly disfavored. On the other hand, using unified model priors, the observational data are also well described, in particular for small and large values of the generalized Chaplygin gas parameter $\alpha$. The latter result is in agreement with a recent, more qualitative but fully relativistic, perturbation analysis in Gorini et al.