Shear-free conditions of a Chaplygin-gas-dominated universe

Abstract

In this work, we revisit the shear-free conjecture of general relativity and study the well-known shear-free condition in the context of the Chaplygin-gas cosmology. It had been shown in previous investigations that, in the general relativistic framework, the matter congruences of shear-free perfect fluid spacetimes should be either expansion-free or rotation-free. Our current investigation, however, indicates that a universe dominated by a Chaplygin-gas can allow a simultaneous expansion and rotation of the fluid provided that certain non-trivial conditions, which we derive and describe in what follows, are met. We also show that, in the appropriate limiting cases, our results reduce to the expected results of dust spacetimes which can only expand or rotate, but not both, at the same time.