Abstract
Coupling dark energy and dark matter through an effective fluid description is a very common procedure in cosmology; however, it always remains in comoving coordinates in the special FLRW space. We construct a consistent, general, and covariant formulation, where the interaction is a natural implication of the imperfectness of the fluids. This imperfectness makes difficult the final step towards a robust formulation of interacting fluids, namely the construction of a Lagrangian whose variation would give rise to the interacting equations. Nevertheless, we present a formal solution to this problem for a single fluid, through the introduction of an effective metric.
- Received 5 June 2014
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.90.063510
© 2014 American Physical Society