Connections among three roads to cosmic acceleration: decaying vacuum, bulk viscosity, and nonlinear fluids

Abstract

We discuss the connection among three distinct classes of models often used to explain the late cosmic acceleration: decaying cosmological term, bulk viscous pressure, and nonlinear fluids. We focus on models that are equivalent at zeroth order, in the sense they lead to the same solutions for the evolution of the scale factor. More specifically, we show explicit examples where this equivalence is manifest, which include some well know models belonging to each class, such as a power law Lambda-term, a model with constant viscosity, and the Modified Chaplygin Gas. We also obtain new analytic solutions for some of these models, including a new Ansatz for the cosmic term.