Instability of holographic dark energy models

We investigate the difference between holographic dark energy, Chaplygin gas, and tachyon model with constant potential. For this purpose, we examine their squared speeds of sound which are evaluated to zeroth order in perturbation theory and hence depends only on time. We find that the squared speed for holographic dark energy is always negative when choosing the future event horizon as the IR cutoff, while those for Chaplygin gas and tachyon are non-negative. This means that the perfect fluid for holographic dark energy is classically unstable. Hence the holographic interpretation for Chaplygin gas and tachyon is problematic. (c) 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.