Emerging the dark sector from thermodynamics of cosmological systems with constant pressure

TL;DR

This paper explores the thermodynamics of fluids with constant pressure, proposing a unified dark sector model that can mimic dark energy and dark matter, and analyzing conditions for phantom behavior and degeneracy with LCDM.

Contribution

It introduces a thermodynamic framework for constant-pressure fluids as a unified dark sector model, revealing conditions for degeneracy with LCDM and phantom behavior with dissipation.

Findings

Adiabatic and isothermal processes coincide for these fluids.

Degeneracy with LCDM occurs only in adiabatic evolution.

Dissipative processes can induce phantom dark energy behavior.

Abstract

We investigate the thermodynamics of general fluids that have the constriction that their pressure is constant. For example, this happens in the case of pure dust matter, for which the pressure vanishes and also in the case of standard dark matter phenomenology. Assuming a finite non-zero pressure, the corresponding dynamics is richer than one naively would expect. In particular, it can be considered as a unified description of dark energy and dark matter. We first consider the more general thermodynamic properties of this class of fluids finding the important result that for them adiabatic and isothermal processes should coincide. We therefore study their behaviors in curved space-times where local thermal equilibrium can be appealed. Thus, we show that this dark fluid degenerates with the dark sector of the LCDM model only in the case of adiabatic evolution. We demonstrate that, adding dissipative processes, a phantom behavior can occur and finally we further highlight that an arbitrary decomposition of the dark sector, into ad hoc dark matter and dark energy terms, may give rise to phantom dark energy, whereas the whole dark sector remains non-phantom.