Accelerating cosmological expansion from shear and bulk viscosity

Abstract

The dissipation of energy from local velocity perturbations in the cosmological fluid affects the time evolution of spatially averaged fluid dynamic fields and the cosmological solution of Einstein's field equations. We show how this backreaction effect depends on shear and bulk viscosity and other material properties of the dark sector, as well as the spectrum of perturbations. If sufficiently large, this effect could account for the acceleration of the cosmological expansion.

5 pages, 1 figure, published version

References in corpus (4)

• Does Bulk Viscosity Create a Viable Unified Dark Matter Model?
• A new framework for analyzing the effects of small scale inhomogeneities in cosmology
• Dissipation of dark matter
• Nonlinear evolution of density and flow perturbations on a Bjorken background

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• Nonlinear evolution of density and flow perturbations on a Bjorken background
• Non-conformal evolution of magnetic fields during reheating