Any unified dark matter cosmology can be decomposed into dark matter interacting with vacuum energy, without introducing any additional degrees of freedom. We present observational constraints on an interacting vacuum plus dark energy corresponding to a generalised Chaplygin gas cosmology. We consider two distinct models for the interaction leading to either a barotropic equation of state or dark matter that follows geodesics, corresponding to a rest-frame sound speed equal to the adiabatic sound speed or zero sound speed, respectively. For the barotropic model, the most stringent constraint on α comes from the combination of CMB+SNIa+LSS(m) gives α < 1.44 × 10 −5 at the 95% confidence level, which indicates that the barotropic model must be extremely close to the ΛCDM cosmology. For the case where the dark matter follows geodesics, perturbations have zero sound speed, and CMB+SNIa+gISW then gives the much weaker constraint −0.1522 < α < 0.2556 at the 95% confidence level.

Abstract. In this paper, we revisit generalized Chaplygin gas (GCG) model as a unified dark matter and dark energy model. The energy density of GCG model is given as ρGCG/ρGCG0, where α and Bs are two model parameters which will be constrained by type Ia supernova as standard candles, baryon acoustic oscillation as standard rulers and the seventh year full WMAP data points. In this paper, we will not separate GCG into dark matter and dark energy parts any more as adopted in the literatures. By using Markov Chain Monte Carlo method, we find the result: α = 0.00126 +0.000970+0.00268 −0.00126−0.00126 and Bs = 0.775