2025/01/23 by Yuan, Chen, Lu, Yizhou, Chen, Zu-Cheng +1 · 4 citations
#Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics (astro-ph.CO) #FOS: Physical sciences #General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology (gr-qc)
paper · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2501.13691
Second-order tensor perturbations induced by primordial fluctuations play a crucial role in probing small-scale physics, but gauge dependence of their energy density has remained a fundamental challenge in cosmological perturbation theory. We address this issue by introducing a boundary condition-based filtering method that extracts physical radiation through the Sommerfeld criterion. We demonstrate that after filtering non-physical modes, the energy density of secondary gravitational waves becomes gauge-invariant and exhibits physically consistent behavior in the sub-horizon limit. This approach provides a unified framework for both adiabatic and isocurvature perturbations, enhancing theoretical predictions and observational signatures of early universe physics.