Dissipative Dark Energy can explain the DESI phantom crossing

Abstract: DESI results preferring an evolving dark energy component that appears to cross the phantom-divide in the recent past has raised a lot of interest in exploring the nature of dark energy. We present here a simple dissipative dark energy scenario that can explain both the evolving nature of dark energy as well as its crossing of the phantom-divide without invoking any pathological phantom-like dynamics for the quintessence field. We show that even weak dissipation of the quintessence is enough to explain the current DESI observations.