2008/11/30 by S. H. Pereira, J. F. Jesus · 63 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #Advanced Thermodynamics and Statistical Mechanics #Astrophysics #Cosmology #Cosmology and Gravitation Theories #Dark Matter and Cosmic Phenomena #Dark energy #Dark fluid #Dark matter #Energy (signal processing) #Hot dark matter #Light dark matter #Mixed dark matter #Particle physics #Physics #Quantum mechanics #Scalar field dark matter #Warm dark matter #astro-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevd.79.043517
published in Physical review. D. Particles, fields, gravitation, and cosmology/Physical review. D. Particles and fields 79(4) (American Physical Society) · Matches the published version. Section V changed. Formalism and main conclusion unchanged
openalex publication_date 2009/02/19 · arxiv created 2009/02/26 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
We analyze the interaction between dark energy and dark matter from a thermodynamical perspective. By assuming they have different temperatures, we study the possibility of occurring a decay from dark matter into dark energy, characterized by a negative parameter Q. We find that, if at least one of the fluids has nonvanishing chemical potential, for instance \ensuremathμx<0 and \ensuremathμdm=0 or \ensuremathμx=0 and \ensuremathμdm>0, the decay is possible, where \ensuremathμx and \ensuremathμdm are the chemical potentials of dark energy and dark matter, respectively. Using recent cosmological data, we find that, for a fairly simple interaction, the dark matter decay is favored with a probability of \ensuremath∼93% over the dark energy decay. This result comes from a likelihood analysis where only background evolution has been considered.