English

On the coupling between spinning particles and cosmological gravitational waves

General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology 2008-11-26 v1 Astrophysics

Abstract

The influence of spin in a system of classical particles on the propagation of gravitational waves is analyzed in the cosmological context of primordial thermal equilibrium. On a flat Friedmann-Robertson-Walker metric, when the precession is neglected, there is no contribution due to the spin to the distribution function of the particles. Adding a small tensor perturbation to the background metric, we study if a coupling between gravitational waves and spin exists that can modify the evolution of the distribution function, leading to new terms in the anisotropic stress, and then to a new source for gravitational waves. In the chosen gauge, the final result is that, in the absence of other kind of perturbations, there is no coupling between spin and gravitational waves.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.0804.0572,
  title  = {On the coupling between spinning particles and cosmological gravitational waves},
  author = {Irene Milillo and Massimiliano Lattanzi and Giovanni Montani},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0804.0572},
  year   = {2008}
}

Comments

4 pages, to appear in Proceedings of the II Stueckelberg Workshop - Int. J. Mod. Phys. A

R2 v1 2026-06-21T10:27:26.996Z