Covariantizing the interaction between dark energy and dark matter

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.