Interacting viscous dark fluids

TL;DR

This paper examines a cosmological model with viscous dark matter interacting with dark energy, incorporating radiation and baryons, and tests its viability against observational data, finding it generally disfavored compared to LCDM.

Contribution

It revises the physical viability conditions for viscous dark matter models with dark energy interaction and compares them with multiple cosmological observations.

Findings

Observations favor negative bulk viscosity coefficients.

The model does not outperform the standard LCDM in data fitting.

Positive bulk viscosity is inconsistent with thermodynamics.

Abstract

We revise the conditions for the physical viability of a cosmological model in which dark matter has bulk viscosity and also interacts with dark energy. We have also included radiation and baryonic matter components; all matter components are represented by perfect fluids, except the dark matter, that is treated as an imperfect fluid. We impose upon the model the condition of a complete cosmological dynamics that results in an either null or negative bulk viscosity, but the latter also disagrees with the Local Second Law of Thermodynamics. The model is also compared with cosmological observations at different redshifts: type Ia supernova, the shift parameter of CMB, the acoustic peak of BAO, and the Hubble parameter H(z). In general, observations consistently point out to a negative value of the bulk viscous coefficient, and in overall the fitting procedure shows no preference for the model over the standard LCDM model.