The effect of the variable chaplygin gas on the CMB.
| dc.contributor.advisor | Zunckel, Caroline Louis. | |
| dc.contributor.author | Makhathini, Sphesihle. | |
| dc.date.accessioned | 2013-06-25T08:56:05Z | |
| dc.date.available | 2013-06-25T08:56:05Z | |
| dc.date.created | 2013 | |
| dc.date.issued | 2013 | |
| dc.description | Thesis (M.Sc.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2013. | en |
| dc.description.abstract | In this dissertation, we consider the variable chaplygin gas (VCG) model as derived from the Tachyon gas model and search for a sub-class of models that provide an adequate fit to the cosmic microwave background (CMB) observations. We find that, for an appropriate choice of VCG parameters, up to ~ 80% of the VCG collapses into a gravitationally bound condensate which behaves as matter; the evolution of the remaining VCG, as governed by its equation of state, brings about accelerated expansion at late times. In light of this high collapsed fraction, we approximate the VCG transfer function with that of cold dark matter. We show that we can sufficiently describe the VCG cosmology from decoupling to today in terms of a model in which the gravitationally bound condensate plays the role of cold dark matter and the remaining VCG takes the place of dark energy in the concordance model. We then compute the CMB temperature anisotropy spectrum for a subset of VCG models and proceed to find a best-fit model to the WMAP-9yr data [46]. Our best-fit model has a x² per degrees of freedom of 2.03. | en |
| dc.identifier.uri | http://hdl.handle.net/10413/9206 | |
| dc.language.iso | en_ZA | en |
| dc.subject | Cosmology--Observations. | en |
| dc.subject | Cosmic physics. | en |
| dc.subject | Theses--Physics. | en |
| dc.title | The effect of the variable chaplygin gas on the CMB. | en |
| dc.type | Thesis | en |