The Chaplygin gas as a model for modified teleparallel gravity?

Abstract

This paper explores the possibility of treating the exotic Chaplygin-gas (CG) fluid model as some manifestation of an f(T) gravitation. To this end, we use the different cosmological CG equations of state, compare them with the equation of state for the modified teleparallel gravity and reconstruct the corresponding Lagrangian densities. We then explicitly derive the equation of state parameter of the torsion fluid and study its evolution for vacuum-torsion, radiation-torsion, dust-torsion, stiff fluid-torsion and radiation-dust-torsion multi-fluid systems. The obtained Lagrangians have, in general, matter dependence due to the matter-torsion coupling appearing in the energy density and pressure terms of the modified teleparallel gravity theory. For the simplest CG models, however, it is possibly to reconstruct f(T) Lagrangians that depend explicitly on the torsion scalar T only. The preliminary results show that, in addition to providing Chaplygin-gas-like solutions to the modified teleparallel gravitation, which naturally behave like dark matter and dark energy at early and late times respectively, the technique can be used to overcome some of the challenges attributed to the CG cosmological alternative