Inflation in Terms of a Viscous van der Waals Coupled Fluid

Abstract

We propose to describe the acceleration of the universe by introducing a model of two coupled fluids. We focus on the accelerated expansion at the early stages. The inflationary expansion is described in terms of a van der Waals equation of state for the cosmic fluid, when account is taken of bulk viscosity. We assume that there is a weak interaction between the van der Waals fluid and the second component (matter). The gravitational equations for the energy densities of the two components are solved for a homogeneous and isotropic Friedmann-Robertson-Walker universe, and analytic expressions for the Hubble parameter are obtained. The slow-roll parameters, the spectral index, and the tensor-to-scalar ratio are calculated and compared with the most recent astronomical data from the Planck satellite. Given reasonable restriction on the parameters, the agreement with observations is favorable.