Dissipative Processes in the Early Universe: Bulk Viscosity

Abstract

In this talk, we discuss one of the dissipative processes which likely take place in the Early Universe. We assume that the matter filling the isotropic and homogeneous background is to be described by a relativistic viscous fluid characterized by an ultra-relativistic equation of state and finite bulk viscosity deduced from recent lattice QCD calculations and heavy-ion collisions experiments. We concentrate our treatment to bulk viscosity as one of the essential dissipative processes in the rapidly expanding Early Universe and deduce the dependence of the scale factor and Hubble parameter on the comoving time $t$. We find that both scale factor and Hubble parameter are finite at $t=0$, revering to absence of singularity. We also find that their evolution apparently differs from the one resulting in when assuming that the background matter is an ideal and non-viscous fluid.Comment: 8 pages, 2 eps figure, Invited talk given at the 7th international conference on "Modern Problems of Nuclear Physics", 22-25 September 2009, Tashkent-Uzbekista