Bulk viscous quintessential inflation

Abstract

The incorporation of bulk viscosity process to General Relativity leads to the appearance of nonsingular backgrounds that, at early and late times, depict an accelerated universe. These backgrounds could be analytically calculated and mimicked, in the context of General Relativity, by a single scalar field whose potential could also be obtained analytically. We will show that, we can build viable backgrounds that, at early times, depict an inflationary universe leading to a power spectrum of cosmological perturbations which match with current observational data, and after leaving the inflationary phase, the universe suffers a phase transition needed to explain the reheating of the universe via gravitational particle production, and finally, at late times, it enters into the de Sitter phase that can explain the current cosmic acceleration.

Version accepted for publication in IJMPD