Inflationary cosmology with two-component fluid and thermodynamics

Abstract

We present a simple and self-consistent cosmology with a phenomenological model of quantum creation of radiation and matter due to decay of the cosmological constant $Λ$. The decay drives a non-isentropic inflationary epoch, which exits smoothly to the radiation-dominated era, without reheating, and then evolves to the dust era. The initial vacuum for radiation and matter is a regular Minkowski vacuum. The created radiation and matter obeys standard thermodynamic laws, and the total entropy produced is consistent with the accepted value. This paper is an extension of the model with the decaying cosmological constant considered previously. We compare our model with the quantum field theory approach to creation of particles in curved space.