# Dynamics of viscous cosmologies in the full Israel-Stewart formalism

## TL;DR

This paper analyzes the dynamics of viscous cosmologies within the full Israel-Stewart formalism, showing that interactions between dark energy and viscous dark matter are necessary for viable evolution and can lead to phantom-like dark energy.

## Contribution

It introduces a detailed dynamical analysis of viscous cosmologies with dark energy and dark matter interactions in the Israel-Stewart framework, highlighting the necessity of interaction for realistic evolution.

## Key findings

- Thermal history is consistent for small viscous coefficients.
- Interacting dark energy and viscous dark matter can produce accelerated expansion.
- Phantom-like dark energy is favored in the interacting viscous cosmology model.

## Abstract

It is performed a detailed dynamical analysis for a bulk viscosity model in the full Israel-Stewart formalism for a spatially flat Friedmann-Robertson-Walker Universe. In our study we have considered the total cosmic fluid constituted by radiation, dark matter and dark energy. The dark matter fluid is treated as an imperfect fluid which has a bulk viscosity that depends on its energy density in the usual form $\xi(\rho_{m})=\xi_{0} \rho_{m}^{1/2}$, whereas the other components are assumed to behave as perfect fluids with constant EoS parameter. We show that the thermal history of the Universe is reproduced provided that the viscous coefficient satisfies the condition $\xi_{0}\ll 1$, either for a zero or a suitable nonzero coupling between dark energy and viscous dark matter. In this case, the final attractor is a dark-energy-dominated, accelerating Universe, with effective EoS parameter in the quintessence-like, cosmological constant-like or phantom-like regime, in agreement with observations. As our main result, we show that in order to obtain a viable cosmological evolution and at the same time alleviating the cosmological coincidence problem via the mechanism of scaling solution, an explicit interaction between dark energy and viscous dark matter seems inevitable. This result is consistent with the well-known fact that models where dark matter and dark energy interact with each other have been proposed to solve the coincidence problem. Furthermore, by insisting in above, we show that in the present context a phantom nature of this interacting dark energy fluid is also favored.