Interpretation of bulk viscosity as the generalized Chaplygin gas

Abstract: The cosmological observations suggest that the presently accelerating universe should be filled by an exotic form of matter, violating the strong energy condition, of unknown nature and origin. We propose the viscous dark matter of a source of acceleration in the form of Chaplygin gas which is characterized by equation of state in the phenomenological form $p=-\frac{A}{\rho^{\alpha}}$, where $p$ and $\rho$ are pressure and energy density respectively ($A$ and $\alpha$ are constants). Chaplygin gas is interpreted in terms of viscous matter and without the cosmological constant. The acceleration effect is caused only by viscosity in this class of cosmological models. We show that bulk viscosity effects introduced to the standard FRW cosmology give rise to the natural unification of both dark matter and dark energy. We show that dust viscous cosmological models are structurally stable if $m < 1/2$ ($1+\alpha=1/2-m$).