HYDRODYNAMIC ORIGIN OF EFFECTIVE PHANTOM CROSSING: Relating DESI DR2 Dark-Sector Drag to the Discrete Vorton Vacuum

The empirical necessity of an interacting dark sector to explain DESI DR2 and supernova data
without ghost fields is strong evidence that the cosmological vacuum is not an inert continuum.
Rather than introducing unobserved scalar fields, tracker potentials, and adjustable Yukawa
couplings, the cosmological phenomena documented by Ganguly et al.—apparent phantom divide
crossing (weff < −1), baryon-CDM growth decoupling (δc ̸= δb), and a ∼ 54% drag cancellation
of gravitational clustering—are the direct mechanical expressions of an incompressible 861-node
vorton lattice relaxing under the Fiedler spectral gap λ1 = 1/12 and commensurability defect
δ = −1/24.