Role of baryons in unified dark matter models -: art. no. 101301

We discuss the importance of including baryons in analyses of unified dark matter scenarios, focusing on toy models involving a generalized Chaplygin gas. We determine observational constraints on this unified dark matter scenario coming from large-scale structure, type Ia supernovae and CMB data showing how this component can bring about a different behavior from the classical cold dark matter model with a cosmological constant and thus motivate further studies of this type of models. We also speculate on interesting new features which are likely to be important on nonlinear scales in this context.