Cosmic acceleration with bulk viscosity in an anisotropic $f(R,L_m)$ background

Communications in Theoretical Physics, 75(7) (2023) 075401 In this article, we investigate the observed cosmic acceleration in the framework of a cosmological $f(R,L_m)$ model dominated by bulk viscous matter in an anisotropic background. We consider the LRS Bianchi type I metric and derive the Friedmann equations that drive the gravitational interactions in $f(R,L_m)$ gravity. Further, we assume the functional form $f(R,L_m)=\frac{R}{2}+L_m^\alpha $, where $\alpha$ is a free model parameter, and then find the exact solutions of fields equations corresponding to our viscous matter dominated model. We incorporate the updated H(z) data and the Pantheon data to acquire the best-fit values of parameters of our model by utilizing the $\chi^2$ minimization technique along with the Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) random sampling method. Further, we present the behavior of physical parameters that describe the universe's evolution phase, such as density, effective pressure and EoS parameters, skewness parameter, and the statefinder diagnostic parameters. We found that the energy density indicates expected positive behavior, whereas the negative behavior of bulk viscous pressure contributes to the universe's expansion. The effective EoS parameter favors the accelerating phase of the universe's expansion. Moreover, the skewness parameter shows the anisotropic nature of spacetime during the entire evolution phase of the universe. Finally, from statefinder diagnostic test, we found that our cosmological $f(R,L_m)$ model lies in the quintessence region, and it behaves like a de-Sitter universe in the far future. We analyze different energy conditions in order to test the consistency of the obtained solution. We found that all energy conditions except SEC show positive behavior, while the violation of SEC favors the recently observed acceleration with the transition from decelerated to an accelerated epoch of the universe's expansion in the recent past.