Dark matter to dark energy transition in k-essence cosmologies

Abstract

We implement the transition from dark matter to dark energy in k-essence cosmologies for a very large set of kinetic functions F, in a way alternative to recent proposals which use generalized Chaplygin gas and transient models. Here we require that the pressure admits a power-law expansion around some value of the kinetic energy where the pressure vanishes. In addition, for suitable values of the parameters of the model, the speed of sound of the dark matter will be low. We first present the discussion in fairly general terms, and later consider for illustration two examples. © World Scientific Publishing Company.