A solid unification of the dark sector

Abstract

We construct a unified description of dark matter and dark energy in terms of a single dark component that behaves as a pressureless fluid in the early Universe and undergoes a transition to a solid phase at late times that can support accelerated expansion. A generalized Chaplygin-type solid provides a simple realization of this scenario. The solid nature of the dark medium prevents the instabilities and strong acoustic oscillations that typically arise in perfect-fluid unifications. It also gives rise to distinctive signatures in cosmological perturbations, such as a suppression of structure growth, a nontrivial gravitational slip, and an effective mass for gravitational waves. Since these effects share a common origin in the solid phase, they become relevant only at low redshifts, leaving the high-redshift cosmology essentially unmodified. This demonstrates that a solidly unified dark sector can reproduce the desired background transition from dark matter to dark energy while yielding testable imprints in cosmological perturbations.